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Technology Industry

Bugs in the spam

Communications News, June, 2004

In the last year, nearly 50% of all spam has been "bugged" by spammers, according to MX Logic, Denver, a provider of e-mail defense solutions. "Millions of users are unaware that spammers have the ability to track when they view and open their e-mail," says Scott Chasin, chief technology officer, MX Logic.

To ensure an address is valid and ripe for future spamming, spammers embed "Web bugs" or "spare beacons"--pieces of HTML code--into their spam messages. Spam beacons are a variant of Web bugs, which traditionally have been used by Web marketing companies to measure page views and track Web surfing behavior. When an end-user opens or even previews an e-mail containing an embedded spam beacon, it sends its signal back to the spammer, validating the address. The spam beacon is a query or path information string that can contain an encoded form of the recipient's e-mail address embedded in a Web request.

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"While Web bugs are not a new phenomenon to the Internet, this new data reinforces the fact that spammers are using increasingly deceptive tools to invade end-users' privacy and harvest valid e-mail addresses," Chasin says.

For more information from MX Logic: www.rsleads.com/406cn-269

Technology Industry

Bugs in the spam

Communications News, June, 2004

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