Spam: Where Does It Come From?

by lg0p89

I will try and make this less sciencey and more palpable.

We are all familiar with the Hormel Foods product, however more germane to our industry is the email that we receive so very much of.  The actual origin of spam can be difficult to pinpoint.  One source appears to have been Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) groups sending messages out repeatedly.  Initially, spam was termed as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).  This is not very exciting and the acronym did not catch on.  Spam is sent from the entity to a vast array of recipients that the entity does not know.  The goal is to send these spam emails out to anyone and everyone in order to get the person to click on the pointer in the email or visit the website noted in the email.

Definition

Although everyone is familiar at some level with spam, having seen it too many times, there are many generic definitions available.

The definitions, however, may differ significantly based on the focus of the person who is examining this.  There are three main points with spam.  The recipient is not important.  This is due to the message being virtually the same for the email that is sent out to thousands of people.  The intent is to get the spam to as many people as possible so a handful would possibly purchase the product or service, or at least simply view it.

Secondly, the person being spammed did not ask or request for the information to be sent.  They are simply sitting at home and decide to get online to check their email account.  When they open this up, the person sees hundreds of emails for various items.  They have not asked for any of this to be sent to them.  For the most part, this gives the person a headache and they have no interest in reading these.

Lastly, the emails are sent in bulk.  For spam to economically work, these have to be sent out in bulk.  For the amount of spam that is sent, it is impossible to manually type in or use autocomplete for the email addresses of all of the hundreds of thousands of spam emails that are sent out in such a short period of time.  If these had to be done one by one, this business model would not work at all.  Being sent in bulk makes it economical time-wise and cost-wise.

The spam may contain pornographic information, pharmaceutical enticements, websites for dating, information for applying to online schools, home alarm systems, dentists, government loans, and any other topic you can imagine.

Do People Actually Click on Spam?

The short answer is yes.

A not significant number of people actually purchase items from spam emails.  Most people see these and simply delete them, not putting much thought into the content.  With so few people actually clicking and purchasing items from this, the per spam email price or cost has to be low, which is why these are sent in such mass bulk emails.  Without the unit cost being so low, this would not work out very well financially for people.

Merely by clicking on the spam ad or purchasing something from this avenue of communication assists the spammer.  They may receive a commission from the click or purchase.  Also, with simply the response to the email, the person is validating their email address to the spammer.  If no one were to interact with the spammer and the spam email itself, the spammers would not make money and simply would go away and cease their operations, much like dust in the wind.  If there is no money to be made, they will not participate or operate.

Issue

What makes this such an issue?

People should not get worked up due to their just deleting these as they come in.  Well, there is more to it than just the prima facie review.  To delete these takes time.  People would rather not spend their down time deleting spam emails.  This is a waste and the ads at times drive you a bit nuts.

Energy is a commodity.  This is not a natural resource.  Energy has to be created from something.  This could be from hydro-electric, burning coal, or other sources.  There is a cost with this.  The vast number of spam emails takes energy to send.  This adds up over a year.

The spam can also be harassing.  The person may not quite appreciate the male or female sexist jokes, links to porn, ads for pharmaceuticals to make the male member larger, etc.  Many people just don't want to see this.  This frustrates the reader and makes them want to choke someone.

What Makes Spam So Prevalent?

For better or worse, it is inexpensive to send spam.

It is really cheap to send these out to the planet.  There are no printing or marketing costs.  There is an insignificant amount of labor cost to set up the system to send these out.  Bots can be used to do the sending.  For the ad or spam, there is no level of senior management to review this and approve the email.

One of the primary costs lies with securing the list of email addresses.  This is also not very costly.  Hundreds of thousands of these are relatively cheap and also on business websites (such as lists of attorneys or banks); the staff's email addresses may be found for free.

Where Does This Come From?

There are a number of sources for spam.

In 2004, the top 12 spam generating nations per Sophos were the United States at 56.7 percent, Canada at 6.8 percent, China and Hong Kong at 6.2 percent, and South Korea at 5.7 percent.  This represented most of the traffic.

Over the years, naturally, the distribution has changed.  The June 2013 Symantec Intelligence Report had the United States at 8.26 percent, Finland at 6.38 percent, Spain at 6.36 percent, Brazil at 5.89 percent, India at 5.51 percent, Argentina at 5.23 percent, and Italy at 4.69 percent.  This is a nice and relatively even distribution of spam generating countries.

Research

Over the years, as noted, the distribution of spam generating countries has varied.

On and off, the United States has been named as a major spam contributor.  Over the last year, I have been wondering if this is still the case, or has the spam migrated?  You never know until you take a look at the actual spam.  In order to do this, I decided to review a portion of my spam for a distribution of countries.  This was done more for curiosity's sake.

Participant

There was just me and my junk mail box.

This made the process very simple and I did not have to talk to a number of people.  As the spammers are sending their waves across the planet, the junk mailbox should still receive a fair representation of the population of spam.

Procedure

There is a wide variety of spam that is sent and received by everyone with an email address every single day, including the weekends.  Some of the types of these have been noted.  There are many of these, however, that do entertain and amuse the readers.  With the mass number of emails received every day, the totality of this could have been researched.  I could have chosen to analyze the spam asking me to collect millions and all I have to do is pay a slight fee, correct my performance in bed with a pill (I did not know I had a problem), or start an online nursing program (I really hate shots).

Instead of the myriad of these ignorant spam options, I chose a set of emails from the adoring and glamorous Adriana.  Actually, I have no idea if this is a person or if she is just in the Matrix, or what she may actually look like.  Quite possibly, it is the name that was alluring, which is probably why so many males click on her spam.  For all I know, Adriana could be a 60-year-old, chain-smoking, balding male living in his mom's basement who used to work at Circuit City.  With the frequency that she has been emailing/spamming me, I know with a reasonable certainty she has been emailing/spamming everyone on the planet.

All of the emails proclaim "BABE...  I guess your not getting any of my email huh?"  It hurts to type this with the misspellings and semantic errors.  I had to look twice in order to type this simple sentence.  In review of the remaining portion of the email, there were errors throughout.  At times, the errors were comical.

Sampling Procedure

The sampling was done in a passive manner.

I waited for the spam to arrive in my email account.  I did not reach out to any sources to plant my email address to get my address in their rotation.  The sample consisted of only the infamous Adriana emails.  I could have opened the research sample up to every single spam email in my junk folder, however, I wanted more to look at the varied sources from the standard template from my dear Adriana.  To ensure this was from someone or a bot named Adriana, the "To" address was checked to verify this.

To limit the time to a reasonable period versus an epoch of emails to filter, the dates of receipts were from July 25, 2013 through November 28, 2013, or 128 days.  This is more than a fair amount of time to receive a good representative sample of emails showing where these are being sent from given this covers four months.

Findings

Over the 128 days, there were 34 contacts.

This translates to, on average, one contact every four days.  Given the number of spam recipients throughout the globe, this would not be too unusual.  Also, Adriana can't really send me the same message very single day.  "She" would get too bored and may even be viewed as stalking me.

Distribution

I was curious as to whether there was a cycle to the spam.

For instance, perhaps there would be less spam when it was warmer, as people would be vacationing in the Northern Hemisphere.  In July, there were four contacts.  So for July there were six days covered.  This means there was one contact per day on average.  This is above the overall average.

August had ten contacts during the 31 days.  This is a vacation month.  Perhaps the spammers were acknowledging in their own special way a majority of people would be gone during this time and not checking their emails.  After all, people are more likely to look at less than 50 emails in a spam folder versus the 895 spam emails that would accumulate over a vacation.

September, on the other hand, was a bit different.  There were 16 contacts in the 30 days.  This is over a half of a contact per day.  This was expected.  October was exceptionally odd.  There were no contacts in October for the 31 days.  November had a bit of an uptick.  In this month, there were four contacts for the 28 days.  This was less than expected.  The spammers may have started shopping for the holidays or prepping for the family to come over.

Templates

Even someone as remedial as myself can see these emails are from a template.

These had nearly the same verbiage.  The emails themselves are not going to be repeated verbatim here for the typical Adriana email.  If you want to see, just check your junk/spam email box every five days.  With this template, anyone can use this and other Adriana emails.  Although this was from a template, there were a handful of variations of this.  The range of word length was from 5,266 to 5,280 words.  This provided for a 14 word range from the samples provided by Adriana.  This shows the spam emails were closely related and used the same basic format.

Country of Origin

This was the focus of the research and my mild-mannered curiosity.

In theory, there should be a reasonable variation of the origins, as other recent surveys have found.  As a precautionary note, this may be the actual country the email was sent from or it could be merely the endpoint from a service.  Given the vast number of spam email sent and the time delay in the using of these services for each and every email, it would not be practical for them to send these using one of the anonymity services.  Thus, as a practical matter, the spam emails probably were not sent via a service or anonymizer.

Continent:  It was expected that a portion of the Adriana emails would come from the United States.  Granted, there are a few statutes that could interfere with this in the U.S., however, there should have been a few instances.  It turns out, of the 34 contacts, 14 were from Asia or 41.2 percent and the remainder, 20 or 58.8 percent were from Europe.  The lack of any originating from the Northern Hemisphere and other sources was surprising.

Country:  The country of origin was, however, much more balanced.  The top ten countries from which Adriana sent me emails were:

Belarus: 26.5% Russian Federation: 20.6% Poland: 11.8% Kazakhstan: 11.8% India: 8.8% Ukraine: 8.8% Serbia: 2.9% Slovakia: 2.9% Vietnam: 2.9% Bulgaria: 2.9%

Nearly half of the emails were from Belarus and the Russian Federation.  This was expected and not all too unusual.  The distribution was as expected, given the last survey found similar results.  What was surprising was that not one contact was from a U.S. email address.  I thought there would be at least a handful of contacts from the United States.

"Click Here":  At the end of the email is the usual "Click Here" for your free VIP link.  I don't know what this gives me, but it must be pretty exciting.  This link takes you to one of the over a dozen various Adriana websites.  Although not clicked upon, there would have probably been a plethora of malware included with the VIP link.

Discussion

Spam, spam, spam.  It is everywhere around us.  This hassle of modern life affects everyone with an email address to some level.  All you have to do is originate an email address and a month later you will start to receive ads for Viagra, products to grow hair, improve your personal performance, or date someone who is interested in you even though she has never met you.

This is an issue because of the amount of time it takes to clear this out, the amount of electricity used to send the billions of spam emails, and, last but not least, the malware that at times is attached.  Although this is a global issue, prior studies have shown differing sources of the spam.  This minor research project sought to reexamine the sources of spam and compare this to prior research.

The source of spam over the years has changed with the surge of legislation.  Earlier research indicated most of the spam was generated in the U.S.  This evolved and the distribution of nations changed from one producer to many.  The latest survey also indicated the nations from which spam was generated also mirrored this, showing a much greater distribution.  The survey distribution from the Adriana spam emails are like these updated surveys.

It appears Adriana has moved mostly from the U.S. to a wider variety of locations across Europe and Asia.  To verify this in the future, I may repeat the study, except for a longer period of time.  Six months or more would be interesting to track.