Explains how spam works, how network administrators can implement spam filters, or how programmers can develop new remarkably accurate filters using language classification and machine learning. Original. (Advanced)

Schwartz explores spam--unwanted e-mail messages and inappropriate news articles--and what users can do to prevent it, stop it, or even outlaw it. "Stopping Spam" provides information of use to individual users (who don't want to be bothered by spam) and to system, news, mail, and network administrators (who are responsible for minimizing spam problems within their organizations or service providers).

Presents an introduction to different types of malware and viruses, describes antivirus solutions, offers ways to detect spyware and malware, and discusses the use of firewalls and other security options.

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

This volume presents the reader with an interesting and, at times, provocative selection of contemporary thinking about cybercrimes and their regulation. The contributions cover the years 2002-2007, during which period internet service delivery speeds increased a thousand-fold from 56kb to 56mb per second. When combined with advances in networked technology, these faster internet speeds not only made new digital environments more easily accessible, but they also helped give birth to a completely new generation of purely internet-related cybercrimes ranging from spamming, phishing and other automated frauds to automated crimes against the integrity of the systems and their content. In order to understand these developments, the volume introduces new cybercrime viewpoints and issues, but also a critical edge supported by some of the new research that is beginning to challenge and surpass the hitherto journalistically-driven news stories that were once the sole source of information about cybercrimes.

Spammers, scammers, and hackers are destroying electronic mail. The email inbox that once excited you with messages from friends, family, and business prospects now causes outright dread and rage. With unsolicited and unwelcome email accounting for as much as 80% of the world's email traffic, it's time for all email users to act to turn the tide in this epic battle for their privacy and sanity. Spam Wars veteran and award-winning technology interpreter Danny Goodman exposes the often criminal tricks that spammers, scammers, and hackers play on the email system, even with the wariest of users. He also explains why the latest anti-spam technologies and laws can't do the whole job. Spam Wars provides the readers with the additional insight, not only to protect themselves from attack, but more importantly to help choke off the economies that power today's time-wasting email floods. Spam Wars puts to rest many popular misconceptions and myths about email, while giving readers the knowledge that email attackers don't want you to have. Danny Goodman's crystal-clear writing can turn any email user into a well-armed spam warrior.