Inside The Spam Cartel: Why Spammers Spam

The chicken crossed the road to get to the other side, but spammers, it seems, spam for less philosophical reasons than "because they can". Like it or love it, spam is a profitable business for those who push it out. Much ado has been made about spam and how to block it, filter it or legislate against it, but it is really just the email equivalent of junk mail or telemarketing phone calls at dinner so people should probably get used to it.

The Book

Inside The Spam Cartel is sort of like a book on global terrorism by Osama Bin Laden. Spammer X is writing from the perspective of the insidious purveyor of spam with intimate knowledge of the seedy inner-workings of how and why spammers do what they do.

The book provides a range of information from the psychology of why a person becomes a spammer, to details about tricks and techniques used to gather email addresses, bypass spam filters and evade detection, to information about the state of legislation against spam and the ability of law enforcement to actually do anything to stop it.

Along the same line as books like Hacking Exposed, which educate about defense while teaching attack technique, some may feel this book shares too much information that might help up and coming spammers go into business. But, learning all of the alleys and backdoors used by spammers to bypass defenses and evade capture can help users be more aware and maybe even help to create a more effective defense.

The bottom line is that spam is profitable for those who know how to do it. Users may not like it, but as long as money can be made through spam it is probably here to stay.

My Review

I do a lot of incident response and antivirus work. While my initial response when a new virus or worm outbreak slams my network is to go into emergency response mode and be more than a little frustrated about giving up my nights or weekends to chase down malware, I often sit back when the dust has settled and admire the creativity and engineering genius that goes into some of the malware.

Spammer X, the author of this book, talks about spam in a similar fashion. It is a dirty, sneaky business, but when you stop to look at the engineering and ingenuity that goes into collecting addresses and distributing the spam it is almost awe inspiring. It would be nice if such programming genius and creative thinking were put to better use, but it is genius nonetheless.

This is one of the best books I have seen about spam. Rather than simply talking about bayesian filters or other blocking technologies or concepts, this book goes into detail about the business side of spam and how they get around your blocking and filters.

It may be a little disheartening to think you can't stop it, but it reads like a novel and it is very enlightening. I highly recommend this book, especially to admins trying to stop spam.