Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Spam migrating to P2P networks

November 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Spam migrating to P2P networks

TAGS: Security

One of the corollaries of our Modern Age, is that hucksters and cheats will glom on to whatever mode of communication is the least expensive and most widely used. We've all resigned ourselves to stacks of junk mail. But we forget that back in the days before e-mail was ubiquitous, fax machines were used to send out bogus pitches and other kinds of unwanted solicitations. But fax spam required a fax machine (or machines), and lots of phone calls. So once e-mail came along, scammers quickly migrated to that medium, where there was a high degree of trust among users, and where the cost to send your solicitations (spam) was essentially $0.

With the e-mail channel now pretty well saturated with spam, however, (67.7 percent of all e-mail, on average, according to MessageLabs) there's a vast hunger out there in the huckster community for a new way to reach users. Increasingly, it's looking like P2P networks may be that channel.

A recent blog post over at SecuriTeam notes the increasing prevalence of spammy-sounding PDF downloads on P2P networks: "How To Create An Automated Ebay Money Machine.pdf," "Easy Chair Millionaire Review.pdf," or "Top Home based Jobs" (a directory).

Just as e-mail spam started as a trickle and grew into a flood, so P2P spam has the potential to overwhelm peer to peer networks that have flourished as a convenient and for the most part reliable medium for sharing and exchanging information, music, and more. The ultimate test, of course, is whether P2P users - a far smaller audience than e-mail users -- will take the bait and, thus, justify the investment.

Posted by Paul Roberts on November 22, 2006 12:34 PM

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