Spam

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast mediums, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

People who create electronic spam are called spammers.

Geographical Origins of Spam

As of this writing and according to experts from SophosLabs, 28.4% of global spam comes from the U.S. In second place is South Korea, bringing 5.2% of global spam. Following the list are China (including Hong Kong): 4.9%; Russia: 4.4%; Brazil: 3.7%; France: 3.6%; Germany: 3.4%; Turkey: 3.%; Poland: 2.7%; United Kingdom (specifically Great Britain): 2.4%; Romania: 2.3%, and Mexico at 1.9%.

How Spam Propagates: Using Zombie Networks

A computer becomes part of a zombie network of computers when it is compromised (typically) by Spyware. It then receives instruction from the lead computer ("the spammer") to begin mass mailing unsolicited bulk mail messages, typically to defraud others. End users of Zombie computers don't even know their system has been compromised, which is why it's extremely important to ensure your computer has all software updates (example: "Windows Updates").

Email spam (UBE, UCE)

Email spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted email messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.

Instant Messaging Spam (spim)

Instant Messaging spam, Known also as spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messaging), makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less ubiquitous than its email counterpart, spim is reaching more users all the time.

Spamdexing (Search Engines)

Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to a practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization techniques" to unfairly increase their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics.

Blam (Blog Spam)

Blog spam, or (also known as "splogs" or "blam"), is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.

Splogs (Artificial Blogs, Scraper Sites)

Spam blogs are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

Spam Targeting Video Sharing Sites

Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by spammers. The most common technique involves people (or spambots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles.

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