Spamming, Phishing, Authentication, and Privacy.

This article reports that unsolicited commercial email, or spam, peddles a variety of dubious products, ranging from pharmaceuticals to abandoned bank accounts. The so-called "phishers" try to steal user names and passwords for online banking. And then, systems are infested with viruses, worms and o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 47; no. 12; pp. 144 - 145
Main Author: Bellovin, Steven M.
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Dec2004
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        au: Bellovin, Steven M.
        affil: Researcher, AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ.
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        Spam email
        Computer security
        Computer access control
        Computer viruses
        Computer hackers
        Computer crimes
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          Spam email
          Computer security
          Computer access control
          Computer viruses
          Computer hackers
          Computer crimes
      ab: This article reports that unsolicited commercial email, or spam, peddles a variety of dubious products, ranging from pharmaceuticals to abandoned bank accounts. The so-called "phishers" try to steal user names and passwords for online banking. And then, systems are infested with viruses, worms and other malware. Although there are would-be solutions to these problems, some of them have the potential to do far more harm than good. An obvious approach to spam fighting is some form of sender authentication. Authenticated email solves some problems. If nothing else, it hinders the spread of email worms, since the infected machine will be positively identified. Furthermore, there are some situations where a list of permitted senders is in fact used. In the best of these schemes, purported identity is used to drive some sort of challenge and response scheme. Authenticated email would provide some protection here, though even without it successful "joe jobs" — forgery of a legitimate user's identity — are relatively uncommon.
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