Technology managers are longing for the days when spam was simply an awful lunchmeat. Recently, the e-mail form of spam has been wreaking havoc on inboxes across the country, and Brown's are no exception. The number of spam messages filtered by the University's anti-spam engine more than tripled in 2006.
At the beginning of last year, Proofpoint, the spam filter used by Computing and Information Services, filtered about 6 million spam messages per month. The number of filtered messages increased to more than 9 million per month in September, and the number jumped to more than 19 million in December.
CIS has taken measures to combat the increasing amount of spam on the Internet. Last January, CIS replaced SpamAssassin, which had been the University's main anti-spam engine, with Proofpoint. "SpamAssassin was an open-source product, which meant spammers found out how to write around it. Proofpoint is proprietary, which means spammers don't know how it works," said John Spadaro, system and services director at CIS.
Due to the rapid rise in spam, CIS has had to reduce the amount of time it keeps messages in quarantine from four to three weeks. "It just didn't make any sense to keep spam mail around for that long," Spadaro said. "The question is: Should we reduce (that time] further?"
Spadaro said CIS also added another e-mail server because of the increased load of spam. But Spadaro said he does not foresee a change in anti-spam engines. "Proofpoint is doing a pretty good job. It is constantly trying to capture spam. We get updates every hour to keep spam definitions in line," he said.
The increase in spam activity is not a phenomenon specific to Brown's e-mail system. The New York Times reported last month that worldwide spam volume has doubled in the past two years, with 9 out of 10 messages now classified as unsolicited junk mail.
John Duksta, lead information technology security engineer, said although the increase in spam is not particular to the University, much of the spam students receive at Brown is a focused attempt by companies to target students. "These companies will send to any address ending in edu," Duksta said.
Technology to fight spam is improving, but spammers are fighting back. "There is a lot of work done by spammers to try to trick anti-spam engines," Spadaro said. One way spammers have been able to work around anti-spam engines is by encoding their message in images, which makes it harder for such e-mails to be detected as spam.
Duksta said another way spammers get around anti-spam engines is through "drive-by downloads." In a drive-by download, spammers send e-mails to try to get the recipient to click on a link. Spammers can then exploit the recipient's browser to send more spam.
Students can take several simple steps to try to prevent spam mail. The most important is to not respond to spam, Spadaro said. Students should also be careful of where they post their e-mail addresses, especially when signing privacy statements.
Despite the growth in the volume of spam, students interviewed by The Herald said they didn't notice a large change in their e-mail accounts.
Kirsten Howard '09 said she did see a small increase in her spam quarantine digest but believed Proofpoint was doing an efficient job. "Having (all the spam messages) in one e-mail is helpful because it doesn't involve a lot of deleting," she said.
