-: Let's talk about spam.
If you've been on the Internet for any amount of time,
you've probably gotten spam before.
Spam is simply the abuse of the
electronic messaging systems.
Things like email, texting, social media,
broadcast media, and even instant messaging.
Most commonly though, we see this with email.
You get to your inbox and it's flooded with spam.
Do you want this type of pill?
Do you want to get taller?
Do you want to lose weight?
Do you want to do this, or do that?
Basically, they're a bunch of offers, and a lot of times
it's because they're trying to sell you something.
But, most of the time,
it's just advertisements, and it's just annoying.
It could also be dangerous, depending on
what attachments they're using.
For example, if they're sending spam out
to hundreds of thousands of users,
and it has embedded malware in it, that would be even worse.
But, luckily, most of the time,
it's just advertisements, and it's just annoying.
Well, if it's so annoying, why don't we just
stop spammers and block their email servers?
Well, unfortunately, spammers are pretty smart, too.
They figured out that they can exploit
other organization's email servers
and use those to send their messages.
The way this works, is that there's a thing
called an open mail relay.
What this means is that every organization who's out there
and has an email server, they have the ability
to send mail out.
They also have the ability to act as a relay
and send mail on the behalf of other email organizations.
So if your organization hasn't properly secured
your own mail relays,
spammers can send mail through your mail servers
out to other people.
Now, do you really care if a spammer
is using your email servers to route their mail through?
Well, you should, because back in 2003
there was a law put in place here in the United States.
It's called CAN-SPAM.
CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault
of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.
And it establishes the United States'
first national standards for sending commercial emails.
It also requires the Federal Trade Commission
to enforce the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.
So if a spammer is able to send mail
through your server and an open relay,
they could be breaking the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003,
and that means the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission,
is going to be coming back to you
because your server is the one that's being used
to send these emails.
In addition to that, if you have open relays open,
and additional people are using those
to send out spam or other messaging,
they're using your processing and your bandwidth to do it
and that can slow down your own systems.
Now, beyond spam, there's another variation,
and it's called SPIM.
SPIM is Spam over Instant Messaging.
SPIM is the abuse of instant messaging systems.
It works just like spam, except it's going to abuse things
like your text messages, your Facebook chat,
chatrooms inside games, and other things like that.
This messaging is also known as IM spam.
Like I said, it works just like regular spam,
except instead of emails, you're getting instant messages,
text messages, or things like that.