RU2472308C1 - Prevention of unauthorised bulk e-mail - Google Patents

Abstract

FIELD: information technologies.

SUBSTANCE: messages filtered on a mail server and recognised as a virus and spam are not only marked, moved to a different mail box or deleted, but also copies of such letters are returned to a sender, as a result its mailbox is overfilled and blocked, and sending of unauthorised bulk e-mail from this address stops. Mailboxes of e-mail servers must be adjusted so that in case of overfilling they become blocked, interrupting mailing.

EFFECT: provision of high extent of protection of information resources of a computer network against unauthorised access of users of a global information network as e-mail messages are exchanged.

2 cl

Description

The invention relates to computer technology and can be used in an information transfer system to protect e-mail from unwanted correspondence.

E-mail is one of the most popular opportunities for using the Internet, mail correspondence has become an integral part of the life and work of users, they carry out a significant amount of electronic messaging between computers.

The Internet provides significant commercial opportunities to reach a large number of potential customers, but e-mail messaging is increasingly being used as a means of distributing junk mail among network users.

According to numerous studies, at least half of all letters that fall into the mailboxes of Internet users are undesirable information - commercial advertisements, self-extracting viruses and subscriptions. Such unauthorized distribution of useless information to a large number of email subscribers is called spam.

Spam - Anonymous unsolicited bulk email. Using spam, they advertise products that cannot be reported legally - porn sites, financial pyramids, counterfeit software, contraband goods and medicines, as well as advertising spam services themselves. There are no Internet users who have not received spam.

Spam is a significant problem for e-mail users, because it takes time to familiarize themselves with unnecessary information and delete it, so it’s clear that there is discontent when such letters arrive every day, and really important messages are lost among them. Unwanted correspondence clogs communication channels, creates traffic that must be paid by the provider or user.

Junk correspondence not only spoils the mood of Internet users, but also carries a danger. There is an increase in the number of malicious attachments in spam, because e-mail is often used as a tool to spread viruses and other dangerous programs.

The spammer’s goal is to bring his information to the maximum possible number of recipients at the lowest possible cost; he is not interested in the qualitative composition, but only in quantity. Spammers send a large number of advertising messages, using them to conduct phishing attacks and distribute dangerous programs. A distinctive feature of such letters is the presence of malicious attachments and links to infected pages. Often the text says that this is a newsletter from which you can unsubscribe by clicking on a specific link, but thereby the user downloads malicious software to his computer.

For mass mailings, spammers use addresses that they receive using robots on free mail sites. Recently, the nature of spam has become increasingly criminal, spam emails are disguised as service messages of well-known Internet services and public organizations. In this way, for example, is phishing distribution of fake messages on behalf of banks. The purpose of this message is to collect logins / passwords and PIN codes of users who are interested in carders who perform illegal operations using the details of other people's bank cards.

To collect email addresses to which mailings are then made, use programs that find them on the Internet. Such a program is able to select thousands of addresses from the network and create a database from them for further use.

A large amount of unnecessary information leads to an excessive load on channels and mail servers. Every day, business representatives spend time removing spam from email inboxes. Users experience many inconveniences and suffer losses from useless and dangerous e-mail messages, which become the main threat to the secure operation of computer technology.

In recent years, the scope of spam has expanded, mailing technologies are being developed, spam is changing its subject, the style of communication with users, the volume of spam mailings has grown significantly due to the emergence of high-speed Internet channels, which gave a quick and inexpensive opportunity to send spam messages in bulk. Accordingly, spam filters are also being developed that prevent unsolicited emails from clogging mailboxes. Hardware manufacturers equip equipment with anti-spam tools that are becoming more effective.

According to various estimates, the share of viruses and spam in the total email traffic is from 70 to 90 percent. According to Kaspersky Lab, the share of spam in mail traffic for the third quarter of 2010 averaged 82.3 percent.

Entire teams work on spamming. Mailing addresses are being collected, specialized programs are being written for mass mailing, and spam mailing list customers are being searched. Spam has turned into a powerful industry; significant amounts of money are spinning in this business. Experts estimate the total losses from spam as several tens of billions of dollars annually, so protection against unwanted mailings is very necessary. Currently, anti-spam protection is as necessary for the general IT security system as anti-virus protection.

The low cost of mass mailings is due to the fact that the Internet is a cheap data transport, moreover, a spammer uses other people's computers to get their messages to which they obtained illegal access.

The increase in the volume and prevalence of spam is explained by the fact that it is a very effective advertising tool. The price of an advertising mailing per one letter is negligible, the coverage of potential customers is huge, the number of responses to advertising, in comparison with the costs, is acceptable for advertisers.

Spammers have a lot of money from mailing list customers, and no one will refuse them voluntarily. The development of spam technology in recent years is explained by substantial amounts invested by advertisers.

Mass mailing of spam has a low cost per sender per message, however, a huge number of useless messages causes great damage to the recipients. The user has to pay for Internet traffic, most of which is unnecessary letters. Providers also suffer additional losses due to increased load on channels and equipment. Providers also have to bear the cost of additional equipment and anti-spam systems.

According to specialists from the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC), in 2009 the damage to the Russian economy from spam amounted to 14.1 billion rubles. However, FBK (Financial and Accounting Advisers) analysts claim that every year spammers inflict damage on the Russian economy from 31.3 to 47.2 billion rubles.

In a number of countries, measures are being taken against spammers, but attempts to legislatively ban or restrict their activities run into a number of difficulties. It is not easy to determine in law which mailing is legal and which is not. The Association of Regional Telecommunications Operators of Russia sent an appeal to the State Duma, in which it supported the initiatives of the government, tightening the responsibility for spam mailings, proposed to introduce criminal liability for sending electronic garbage. The State Duma is preparing amendments to the law "On Information", tightening liability for unauthorized mass mailing of messages.

In Russia, spam is prohibited by the Advertising Law. Distribution of advertising on telecommunication networks is allowed only with the prior consent of the subscriber or addressee to receive it. An advertisement is deemed distributed without prior consent, unless its distributor proves that such consent was obtained.

To filter useless e-mail by mail servers, message filtering is used to pre-check them in accordance with certain criteria. The main purpose of mail filters is to control spam and viruses, for which each letter is checked by antivirus and anti-spam programs. Based on the results of the check, the message can be delivered unchanged to the user's mailbox, marked in a special way, redirected for delivery to a special folder, or even deleted. Some mail filters can edit messages during processing.

Since advertising messages are very different from regular correspondence, a common way to deal with them is to filter them out of the mail stream. Currently, this method is the main and most widely used. Automatic filtering programs use statistical analysis of the content of the letter to decide whether it is spam.

Modern protection programs are able to provide a high level of spam filtering, cutting off more than 90 percent of messages that attacked the user's email inbox.

But this is a passive way to protect against spam, limited to preventing the user from receiving spam without affecting the spammer. Even such authority in the field of protecting Internet users against attacks, in particular against spam, as Kaspersky Lab recommends passive protection measures, such as:

- Do not publish your email address on publicly available resources;

- do not respond to spam messages;

- Do not click on links offering to unsubscribe from the newsletter;

- Do not open spam emails and, especially, attachments to them;

- Do not follow links from spam emails.

The claimed invention provides for an active fight against senders of unauthorized distribution of electronic messages by eliminating the very possibility of mass spamming. The fight against a spammer is conducted by his own weapon - a large volume of letters.

The essence of the invention lies in the fact that messages filtered on the mail server that are recognized as virus and spam are not only marked, moved to another mailbox or deleted, but copies of such letters are returned to the sender. Given that he planned to send millions of messages, then very soon the mailbox is full and blocked and spam from this address stops, without sending a hundredth of the planned volume.

Of course, a spammer can continue sending from a different address, but that one will not last long for the same reason. To replenish the old volume of mailing from one address, now you have to use at least a hundred of them. The spammer will lose the main thing - the ability to send letters. Previously, he sent millions of messages from one mailbox, and now hundreds of times less - as much as a mailbox can hold.

To do this, the mailboxes of e-mail servers must be configured so that when they are full they will be blocked, interrupting the sending of letters. When the disk capacity for this user is exceeded, letters from his mailbox are not sent. Even if mailing is done from a zombie computer, interrupting such mailing at the very beginning means that hundreds of thousands of unwanted messages did not reach the addressee and did not load the network, and its owner at least at that price would find out that his computer is used for such purposes without his knowledge .

The additional load on networks and equipment from returned emails is incommensurable with the reduction from spam restrictions.

A variant is possible in which the sender is returned copies of all letters sent to him, regardless of their content. For an ordinary user sending several dozen letters a day, the appearance of their copies in the Sent Items folder is not critical, and in the case of spam, the mailbox will quickly overflow.

The closest in technical essence to the claimed invention is patent RU 2331913 C2 dated 08/20/2008, G06F 1/00, which presents a filter device for incoming emails to classify them in order to prevent the user from receiving unauthorized and dangerous emails.

The technical result of the claimed invention is to provide a high degree of protection of information resources of a computer network from unauthorized access by users of the global information network when exchanging e-mail messages.

The technical result is achieved due to the fact that messages filtered on the mail server that are recognized as virus and spam are not only marked, moved to another mailbox or deleted, but copies of such letters are returned to the sender, due to which his mailbox is quickly overflowed and blocked, and sending spam from this address stops. In this case, the mailboxes of e-mail servers must be configured so that when they are full they will be blocked, interrupting the sending of letters.

Ensuring a high degree of protection of information resources of the computer network from unauthorized access by users of the global information network when exchanging e-mail messages consists in the fact that messages filtered by the mail server that are recognized as virus and spam are not only marked, moved to another mailbox or deleted, but copies of such letters are returned to the sender, due to which his mailbox is full and blocked, and spam from this address is stopped. Email server mailboxes must be configured so that they become blocked during overflow, interrupting sending emails.

New significant features of the claimed invention are:

- ensuring a high degree of protection of computer network information resources from unauthorized access by Internet users when exchanging e-mail messages;

- messages filtered on the mail server that are recognized as virus and spam are not only marked, moved to another mailbox or deleted, but copies of such letters are returned to the sender, due to which his mailbox is full and blocked, and spam from this address is stopped.

These new essential features, together with the known ones, are necessary and sufficient to achieve a technical result in all cases to which the requested amount of legal protection applies.

The proposed technical solution is industrially applicable, has novelty, for a specialist it is not obvious from the prior art.

Claims (2)

1. Prevention of unauthorized mass e-mail distribution, characterized in that the messages filtered on the mail server, recognized as virus and spam, are not only marked, moved to another mailbox or deleted, but copies of such letters are returned to the sender, due to which his mailbox is full and is blocked, and sending unauthorized mass e-mails from this address is terminated; at the same time, the mailboxes of the email servers are configured in such a way that when they are full, they are blocked, interrupting the sending of letters. 2. Prevention of unauthorized mass e-mail distribution according to claim 1, characterized in that copies of all letters sent to them are returned to the sender, regardless of their content.