What is spam and who sends it?

Spam is the use of media to send unsolicited bulk messages.This means that the recipient receives a message that they did not choose to receive. The most commonly used form of spam is email, although spam is not limited to that. Nowadays, spam can be observed both in instant messengers (such as ICQ, Skype, MSN, etc.), forums, social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) but also in the old familiar form of mail or fax. Basically, you can receive spam via any kind of contact method. Spam emails often serve commercial purposes, where products or services are advertised. Unfortunately, cyber criminals also use spam to steal personal data, spread malware or perform fraudulent activities such as phishing.

Who is behind sending spam?

There are various forms and types of spammers. This can be a single person who has purchased a list of addresses. Or whole groups of people who run servers in many different countries so they can send unsolicited messages to millions of people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Spam can come from a variety of senders, including:

• Advertisers

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  Companies that want to aggressively promote their products or services.
• Scammers

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  Criminals who want to steal personal information or trick users into fraudulent actions.
• Botnets

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  Large networks of infected computers that are remotely controlled by cybercriminals to send mass amounts of spam.

Why are spam messages being sent?

In short?... Money! Due to very little or no costs, spammers have the possibility to reach hundreds of millions of people with their messages. Spammers are already satisfied if only one or two people either click on the link sent within 1000 messages, buy their product or, in the worst case, give out personal data.

With the increasing number of people who have Internet access and are using new technologies, spam or unwanted mass messages are being used as the most popular method of committing crimes (such as bank fraud, identity theft, credit card fraud).

What are the dangers of spam?

Spam poses several dangers, including:

• Phishing

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  Attempts to steal confidential information such as passwords or credit card details.
• Malware

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  Attachments or links can install malicious software on your device.
• Fraud

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  False promises can lead to financial loss.

Spam can also be used to gain unauthorized access to your computer or server. Usually further spam messages are then sent with malicious links that forward the visitor to the website prepared by the spammer. From there, further viruses or Trojans are downloaded without the visitor's knowledge and consent. Most of the time, the malware is also used to create a "bot"-network which gains control over a large number of comupters. These can then be used to spread the malware.