Advocacy
Outblaze has engaged in a number of policy discussions, primarily via consultation and position papers authored by Outblaze executives.
In 2004 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) asked Outblaze Head of Anti-Spam Operations Suresh Ramasubramanian to assist the OECD task force on spam. The result was the 25 May 2005 report Spam Issues in Developing Countries, [8] which alerted governments and organizations to the specific dangers that spam poses to countries with underdeveloped Internet infrastructure. Suresh has further written a paper on botnet mitigation [9] for the ITU.
The Office of the Telecom Authority (OFTA) of Hong Kong put out a consultation paper in June 2004 requesting comments on Proposals to contain the problem of unsolicited electronic messages. [10] The Outblaze response encouraged the government to adopt a range of measures to effectively combat spam, among them: opt-in standards, prompt removal of spammers and hacked or insecure systems, adoption of authenticated email schemes, unequivocal anti-spam legislation, rapid response times at ISPs, and diffusion of better email marketing management techniques. [11] The response was approved and endorsed by the Asia-Pacific chapter of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE).
Electronic mail is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to users of the same computer, and some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online simultaneously, similar to instant messaging. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam), especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same website. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly chant "Spam" over and over again.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003, signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, established the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.
Mobile phone spam is a form of spam, directed at the text messaging or other communications services of mobile phones or smartphones. As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam. Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, mobile spam has steadily increased from 2008 ed 2012 and is projected to account for half of all mobile phone traffic in 2019. In parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam in 2012.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).
Gmail is a free email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on the web and using third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols. Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004 and ended its testing phase on July 7, 2009.
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Wayne Mansfield, of Perth, Australia, was the head of direct marketing business T3 Direct Marketing, operating under a series of two-dollar companies, and in 2005 became the first Australian to be prosecuted for email spamming.
In Internet usage, an email bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending large volumes of email to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox, overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack or as a smoke screen to distract the attention from important email messages indicating a security breach.
This is a non-exhaustive list of notable antivirus and Internet Security software, in the form of comparison tables, according to their platform and their operating systems.
Postini was an e-mail, Web security, and archiving service owned by Google since 2007. It provided cloud computing services for filtering e-mail spam and malware, offered optional e-mail archiving, and protected client networks from web-borne malware.
MailChannels is a privately held, anti-spam company based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Brightmail Inc. was a San Francisco-based technology company focused on anti-spam filtering. Brightmail's system has a three-pronged approach to stopping spam, the Probe Network is a massive number of e-mail addresses established for the sole purpose of receiving spam. The Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center (BLOC) evaluates newly detected spam and issues rules for ISPs. The third approach is the Spam Wall, a filtering engine that identifies and screens out spam based on the updates from the BLOC.
An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. Sometimes the term "chatbot" is used to refer to virtual assistants generally or specifically accessed by online chat. In some cases, online chat programs are exclusively for entertainment purposes. Some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices. Users can ask their assistants questions, control home automation devices and media playback via voice, and manage other basic tasks such as email, to-do lists, and calendars with verbal (spoken?) commands. A similar concept, however with differences, lays under the dialogue systems.
Mobile security, or more specifically mobile device security, has become increasingly important in mobile computing. Of particular concern is the security of personal and business information now stored on smartphones.
Avast Antivirus is a family of cross-platform internet security applications developed by Avast for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. The Avast Antivirus products include freeware and paid versions that provide computer security, browser security, antivirus software, firewall, anti-phishing, antispyware, and anti-spam among other services.
CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc. was a ruling by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in 1997 that set an early precedent for granting online service providers the right to prevent commercial enterprises from sending unsolicited email advertising - also known as spam - to its subscribers. It was one of the first cases to apply United States tort law to restrict spamming on computer networks. The court held that Cyber Promotions' intentional use of CompuServe's proprietary servers to send unsolicited email was an actionable trespass to chattels and granted a preliminary injunction preventing the spammer from sending unsolicited advertisements to any email address maintained by CompuServe.
People tend to be much less bothered by spam slipping through filters into their mail box, than having desired e-mail ("ham") blocked. Trying to balance false negatives vs false positives is critical for a successful anti-spam system. As servers are not able to block all spam there are some tools for individual users to help control over this balance.
PrivacyStar is a service that identifies who is calling and why, and provides for call complaint filing which reports to the Federal Trade Commission. The PrivacyStar service is available on the web and on mobile applications for Android and iOS. On several applications powered by PrivacyStar, call and text blocking is available. The applications, along with PrivacyStar’s iPhone Lookup+ application, enable users to file potential debt collector and telemarketer violations directly to the FTC. The application captures detailed information about possible Fair Debt Collection Practices Act violations including date, time, number, and identity and allows users to easily provide this information to regulatory agencies so they may take action. PrivacyStar has over 1.2 million users who have blocked over 120 million calls and filed over 300,000 complaints directly with the Federal Trade Commission as of September 2012. In fact, PrivacyStar is the leading source of all call complaint data reported to the FTC. In 2015, its users filed 31% of all call complaints. On February 13, 2013, PrivacyStar launched a free SMS spam complaint filing feature for Android smartphones. The application allows users to file text message spam complaints in addition to the existing ability to file call complaints directly to the Federal Trade Commission from their Android phones.
