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History ,Types, Techniques and Anti Spam Solutions International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 3s, (2020), pp. 825-834 Evolutionary Traits In Digital Spam: History ,Types, Techniques and Anti Spam Solutions M.Arunkrishna1, B. Mukunthan2 1Research Scholar, 2 Research Supervisor & Assistant Professor, 1,2Department of Computer Science, Jairams Arts and Science College, (Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli) Karur – 639003, Tamilnadu, India. Abstract The emerging technology has led to the development of various platforms through which millions of people collaborate and communicate with each other. Spamming is the action of sending unsolicited messages through electronic messaging system. Spam is a form of platform manipulation. Spam message can be sent over multiple communication medium such as email,Instant Messages(IM), Online Social Networks(OSN) etc. Statistics show that a large proportion of internet traffic are spam. The person who spreads unsolicited contents to others are known as spammers. Spammers intentionally send messages to recipients who did not grant permission to send them. most of the messages are based on advertisements in which some of them are source of security breaches and lead to phishing or malware attack .This is because the spammers present their contents as valuable or as real one, and send them to the user. The authentic users mistake the spam information as an important one. Keywords: Spam,Digital Spam,types of Spam,Spam Detection,Anti Spam,History of spam,spam detection techniques 1. Introduction Internet is one of the most rapidly evolving technology sectors in the present day. According to the extensive use of the Internet, the electronic medium of communications has become one of the quickest and most economical modes of communication. This makes it easy for internet users to move knowledge from anywhere in the world. However, the increasing use of internet also resulted in the dramatic increase in spam messages. To combat with spam messages on the internet, variety of anti- spam techniques / solutions available with the use of software, hardware or process, we can block spam from entering in to our system. These techniques either blocks or quarantine the suspected messages. Now-a-days, spam messages rise-up into a serious security threat, because it serves as a prime medium for phishing of personal and sensitive information. Even though more number of classification techniques has been established for classification of spam, still none deliver 100% accuracy. So guaranteed accurate prediction of spam message with current experience or knowledge on it is questionable. 1.1. Spamming [8] As the possibility and internet usage grows the kind of communication has more online/internet oriented.(Email,VoIP,IRC,trillion,social networks). Online communication medium is dynamic in its nature, So it is prone to misuse. One of the common and well known issue is spamming. Spam posed to be a very serious problem for online uses. There are number of antispam solutions proposed till date, But they each have their own shortcomings. Spam messages have any one of the following qualities. Unknown sender: The receiver does not have any relation with the sender. Unsolicited: The receiver does not give permission or not interested in receiving the information. Bulk Posting: The message has been sent to large number of audience. ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST 825 Copyright ⓒ 2020 SERSC International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 3s, (2020), pp. 825-834 1.2 Consequences Spam is generally any kind of unsolicited or unwanted digital content which creates a huge waste of time and money to the users. Spam mail steal bandwidth from ISP or from individual users to spread the information and hack computers and young slaving them as zombie Bolt net. Phishing email spam attempts to trick email users into think about that email is coming from somebody else who seems to be genuine such as known person company Bank etc. they redirects the recipients into a website and makes them to offer financial data financial namely credit card number and other sensitive data test this potentially damages the email recipients. 2. History of Spam 2.1. Etymology of internet spam The etymology of the modern word spam for the internet sense appears to derived from the spam skit by Monty python's flying circus. [15] Actually spam is brand name of meat sold in container made by Hormel Food Corporation. But it indirectly refers to the action of something that keeps repeating again and again to great annoyance. Because in Monty python's script a group of people sing a song with the word ‘spam’ to describe that much of ‘spam’(meat sold in container) in the items of food menu, and to irritated that waitress. Since then the word is used to describe exasperation caused by repeating and repeating something same. In the internet sense, online spam means creating nuisance by sending unwanted messages to users. Online spam causes infuriation and as well as it leads users to malware attack, hacking and phishing. 2.2 Evolution of Spam: According to [15] history of spam tract back to the year 1864 where unsolicited messages were spread over telegraph messages which contained investment offers sent to wealthy Americans. After that on May 3rd 1978, the first ever email spam was sent by young man who was working for a digital computer corporation and send spam to showcase companies new VAX computer. The email reached nearly 2600 people who had email accounts on ARPANET(The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) . The actual word of spam in internet referred since 1993 by the bug in Usenet (an early non- centralized computer network for the discussion) cost a massive post of 200 + messages to the news.admin.policy discussion group. Then the members of that group making jokes about that incident and referred to it as ‘spam’,hence the meaning and etymology came from. In January 1994, the first large-scale spam hit Usenet with a notification called "Global Alert for All: Jesus Is Coming Soon" And then, in April of the same year, Usenet was again overloaded with an immigration law commercial by Lawrence A Canter. 1997 -1998: In 1997 first SMTP hijacking has been recorded because SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a sender push technology[3]. So that we can send messages without any authentication return address. In the same year Paul vixie create Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) of spam sites . In 1998 he Greater Washington D.C. Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-DC) hosts meeting on spam. ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST 826 Copyright ⓒ 2020 SERSC International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 3s, (2020), pp. 825-834 Figure 1. Timeline of Digital Spam Year 2000: [3] In the year 2000 Nigerian spam or The “Nigerian prince” email scam happened. It is also known as Nigerian Letter or “419” Fraud and is perhaps one of the longest- running Internet frauds. Where the sender contact victims through text or e-mail messages and encourages the recipient to send information to the e-mail author, such as bank name, account numbers, and blank letterheads. This scam is the result of spam and produced millions of dollars losses. In 2003: spamming Bot net appeared and for the first time, number of spam emails exceeded the legitimate emails. So US jurisdictions have implemented legislation to control spam with US S.877 CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST 827 Copyright ⓒ 2020 SERSC International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 3s, (2020), pp. 825-834 Act of 2003. It regulates the commercial email and gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them and authorities power to put penalties incurred for those who violate the law. 2006: Usage of emailing grows in exponential rate as a result vast majority of the emails were spam. According to Iron- Port's study on June 28, 2006, nearly 80 % of the spam emails initiated from zombie computers [11]. In June 2006, there were 55 billion daily spam emails were stated alone as compared to 35 billion daily spam emails during June 2005 [3]. 2009: Until 2009 majority of the spam send around the world were in English. But in 2009 with the increasing use of automatic language translators, spammers were started to send spam in other languages as well. So it does not have any language barriers. It comes in all languages even in Korean Chinese and all other Asian languages. 2010: An estimated 88 percentage of the internet email traffic was spam 2011: Rustock botnet was taken down by government. It was a largest botnet on record which had the numerous capacity of 30 billion emails. It can able to send 25,000 spam messages per hour from an infected PC. 2012 -2020: The rise of social media spam. And it has been the long continuing battle between the spam and Anti-spam techniques. The technology behind the creation of spam and technology between the anti-spam methods are evolving in starting rate. A few of them are email botnets mining, zombie networks, AI, domain based message authentication and ML based anti-spam techniques. 3. Types Of Spams 3.1. Spam Based on Media Mobile Phone Scams: These scams can cost their victims and are in the form of text messages/ MMS or other mode of communications that mobile phone/ smartphone uses. That was an increase number of unwanted text on advertisements had been reported during 2000 they were sent to users through text messages / calls. Mobile Applications Spam: Spamming in mobile apps includes Applications with no specific functionality. i.e., the application for automatically generated and having no functionality rather than uses.
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