Assignment 1 (SPAM)

How might this effect business?
What is Spam? Spam is unsolicited email or submitting the same message to a large group of individuals in an effort to force the message onto people who would otherwise choose not to receive the message. Spam is one of the largest frustrations for Internet users. For businesses, this frustration adds up to dollars lost and spent trying to prevent it. Reports estimate that spam costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion in lost productivity annually, which equates to $712 per employee. I’m sure most businesses can think of a better use for those dollars, especially in the current economy state.

The problem about spam is that, it increases every year and the cost of email is placed on the receiver rather than the sender. With traditional direct-mail, a company spends money on every piece of email sent. Think about the amount of junk mail you receive every day at your home and business. Now imagine if each piece of mail did not have a hard cost for the sender we would all need much larger mailboxes.

What types of issues should a company anticipate due to spam?
One of the issues that a company should expect due to spam is their reputation. Spam can hurt the reputation of a business, because it is very easy to “spoof” or fake the email address that an email shows it is being sent from. As a business owner, you definitely do not want customers to receive junk or malware emails with your company’s name in the sender’s address bar. Spoofing email is very easy to do as it increases a level of trust that the basic email protocols use. Also spam slows down network traffic and takes up storage space. It can expose the business to email borne virus and malware infections causing the company computer to actually become a source of spam and denial of service attacks. In addition, it can expose the company to frauds and scams such as phishing attacks which target the customer private information like bank accounts number, social security number.

What would you do if your company email was being overtaken by spam? Any infected computers or systems should be taken out of the company network. Also there are number of hardware and software products that can be deployed to clean up spam and the security threats that come along with the spam. Depending on company email infrastructure, a dedicated hardware solution may be the appropriate solution and others third-party Software as a Service (SaaS). With the number of spam emails being sent increasing every day, it is important t for company to make sure that they have the necessary solutions in place to protect and prevent spam attack.