Spam’s cost is hitting schools and taxpayers
Once fodder for late-night laugh lines, the volume of unsolicited e-mail is growing so quickly in the US that other people’s spam, as it’s most well-known, is costing you money.
This is most clearly true in the case of government, school districts in particular. Taxpayers in the Pottsgrove School District, for example, have spam at least partly to thank for the recent vote to spend more than $188,000 on upgrading the district’s computer system. The district’s technology director, Robert Lark, does not pretend that the upgrade is due entirely to spam, but it did contribute, he said. "Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent of the cost, I would say, is due to the sheer volume of e-mail and spam that we’re dealing with," Lark said. And somewhere from 53 to 63 percent of the district’s daily e-mail is spam, Lark said. "The increase over the past year has been phenomenal," he said. Gone are the jokes about Viagra, cheap mortgages or enlarging a part of your anatomy. As the cost of spam grows, people have stopped laughing. Problem is widespread It is not a problem confined to the Pottsgrove School District, or even southeastern Pennsylvania. The Washington Post recently reported that about 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam and that there has been a sharp increase in spam volume in the past six months. By the end of the year, experts predict, half of all e-mail in the nation will be unsolicited, the newspaper reported. "We have been addressing this issue on a continuing basis as there has been such an increase in the volume," said Genevieve Coale, the superintendent of the Spring-Ford Area School District, which has 2,400 computers in its buildings. "I see it as a constant problem." Spring-Ford, like Pottsgrove, manages its own e-mail and thus is responsible for upgrading its servers. "It consumes bandwidth, and it’s eating the servers alive," Lark said. He estimated that including equipment upgrades, filtering software and man-hours, Pottsgrove expends "2 to 3 percent of our technology budget trying to deal with this stuff." Filtering software, equipment and updates cost Pottsgrove between $12,000 to $15,000 a year, he estimated. Fiber optics and filters Other districts take a different approach. In Pottstown, for example, technology coordinator Taffy Wolfe said the problem is less pronounced for a variety of reasons. She said one advantage of Pottstown’s compact nature is the district could afford to string fiber optic cable to connect computers in its nine buildings, and that increases the capacity of Pottstown’s system to handle e-mail traffic, spam and legitimate e-mail alike. Perhaps that is why the district does not run its own e-mail servers, but instead contracts with the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit to do that. Thus the e-mail that arrives in the district has already been largely scrubbed, deleted or blocked by the filters and blockers at the intermediate unit. A good ‘black list’ Phil Rothenberg is the Internet administrator at the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit, which provides e-mail services to 18 users, all public and private schools. Rothenberg’s secret weapon, he said, is a service called a "black list." Run by spam-haters, the companies, with names like www.spamhaus.org and www.spamcop.net, these services keep a running database of addresses and sites on the Internet known to send spam. A computer at the intermediate unit, which is dedicated solely to dealing with e-mail, compares each piece of incoming e-mail against those lists and removes all that have come from spam sites. "Since we started doing that, our spam has dropped off by 50 to 60 percent," Rothenberg said. That has allowed the system to remain comparatively clean and helped in fending off the need for an upgrade, Rothenberg said. "Our e-mail server is not the fastest, and we don’t have gigahertz of power, but it’s running pretty well," he said. He said that in addition to volume, the number of computer viruses that are delivered via e-mail has also spiked, making it even more important to keep a close eye on the rising tide of e-mail that floods the unit’s servers each day. That flood makes money In case you were wondering why spam is increasing so much in the in-box, look no further than your wallet. Jupiter Research told The Washington Post that marketing via e-mail grew to a $1.4 billion industry in 2003. E-mail costs just a fraction of a cent to send, and senders are getting increasingly sophisticated in how they send it. Take, for example, something called a random dictionary attack. If you have received e-mail that just seems to be random words strung together, then you have probably been a victim. A computer program scrambles letters in front of common e-mail suffixes like "@aol.com," and whichever ones don’t bounce back are likely to be legitimate e-mail address. That means you were just put on a list, likely to be sold to someone else who wants to sell you something. Who cleans up after the flood? While spammers might make money stuffing your computer with junk, it costs money to deal with it. Up until now, the problem of spam has been viewed largely as one that afflicts individuals or even businesses, but as the affect infiltrates public institutions such as school and municipal governments, it is the taxpayers who will have to foot the bill for the escalating battle. A San Francisco consulting group named Ferris Research Inc. estimated that U.S. organizations will spend more than $10 billion this year fighting spam, according to The Washington Post. A company with 14,000 employees would spend about $245,000 a year to fight spam. "It’s not just the equipment and the software that you have to buy, it’s the time you have to devote to it," said Doug Yerger, Pottstown’s director of public works and resident webmaster. "Not only are you spending man-hours on it, but it’s taking your time away from other things you should be doing," said Yerger, who said the borough’s nascent Web site has yet to attract the kind of spam volume that local school districts are experiencing. There ought to be a law Actually, there is a law dealing with spam. More than one, in fact. For a while, spam was being dealt with at the state level. Delaware is the only state that actually bans bulk spam. But a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office there told The Washington Post that the state has yet to successfully prosecute one spammer for violating it, largely because spammers are notoriously difficult to track down. Pennsylvania passed laws in June 2000 and December 2002 that set some restrictions. Subject lines are not allowed to include "false or misleading" information and must label sexually explicit e-mail. Pennsylvania’s law also outlawed falsifying routing information, which is what lets spam fighters track spam back to its source. Repeat violators can be fined as much as $1.5 million under the state law. But those state laws were largely superseded on Dec. 15, when President Bush signed a federal anti-spam law. It requires all commercial e-mailers to provide Internet users with the opportunity to opt out of receiving further messages, prohibits sending e-mail with false header information, and sets civil penalties for deceptive subject lines on commercial e-mail. No end in sight Despite laws, black lists, filters, blockers, anti-virus software and higher capacity servers, no one is predicting that the volume of spam will be decreasing any time soon. "It’s becoming more and more of an issue, and it’s only going to get worse and worse," said Wolfe, Pottstown’s technology coordinator. "You can spend money on filters or blockers, and two months later, the spam is getting through again because they’ve figured out how to get around the filters," Yerger said. "It’s a constant chase." You don’t have to tell Pottsgrove’s Lark. "This past year has been a nightmare," he said. "This is no longer a joke. It’s costing people money, and yes, it’s going to end up coming out of taxpayers’ pockets."
Reproduced from an article published by The Mercury
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