United we stand, disunited we're spammed

Steve Linford has been fighting spam for five years through his volunteer-staffed organisation Spamhaus. He's advised parliament, and is now calling for more international co-operation.

Linford is possibly one of the few people who truly knows the depth of the problems caused by spam.

As the founder of web hosting company Ultradesign Internet, as far back as 1997 he began to see the problem of spam. But it was mainly confined to companies and the dot com domain names.

"We kept getting complaints from our customers about spam and it got to the point we had to find a way of dealing with it. I set up Spamhaus, staffed entirely by volunteers, to identify the spammers, and see what methods they were using so we could block them," he said.

As the internet expanded with the introduction of more domain name suffixes, so did the problem, but few internet service providers (ISP) seemed concerned about the loopholes spammers were using.

"We saw they were going to make use of open relays, but ISPs took no notice at first. Once this was dealt with we told them about open proxies but ISPs are still doing little to deal with this," he said.

Linford says the next vulnerability spammers will exploit are CGIs. These innocuous forms on many websites allow consumers to submit feedback to companies. According to Linford these can be hacked and mail servers installed to send spam.

But how ever effective Linford and his team become at identfying the next weakness in their fight to keep their turf clean, fighting spam long ago developed beyond a simple territorial issue.

"We need to make spamming a criminal offence," says Linford.

"Not just in one country globally. If we don't they will just base their operations in countries that don't have these laws which makes it harder to deal with.

"We also need an international police operation - say a division of Interpol - to deal with the spammers who are criminals.

"Once we have driven them underground then we have the technology and can keep developing the technology to fight them and drive them out of business," he says.

But he says the powers that be both here and in the US don't fully grasp the issues.

"Politicians don't seem to understand what spam is. Stephen Timms, ecommerce minister said at the Spam summit two weeks ago there is a place for unsolicited email. Of course there is. A lot of mail is by definition unsolicited and is standard business practice.

"A company can send an email to another that is a query or an order. It is unsolicited, but this doesn't mean it is spam. The problem is unsolicited bulk mail and politicians need to realise there is no reason on earth to send this out," argues Linford.

Linford would also like to see law enforcement agencies around the world give more backing to organisations such as Spamhaus which is regularly threatened with lawsuits - and even death threats.

"It would be nice if we had strong links with the British police such as the National High Tech Crime unit in the way we do with US agencies," he said.

But until countries band together to tackle spam with strong criminal laws, it will continue to proliferate. But he does believe that after it gets worse, the situation may improve.

"With the US likely to introduce opt out anti spam legislation rather than opt in, the problem will get worse as spammers can easily get around this legislation.

"But I should think they will be forced within the next 18 months to two years to introduce opt-in measures and criminal laws to deal with it," he said.