« Simple stuff... like online search. | Main | A day in the life of... »

January 28, 2005

Spam, Spim, Cram and Spit...

First there was Spam - ever pervading the lives of those who use email at any level.

Then, Spim was born - IM spam - which I've not really been affected by recently. In the old days when I used ICQ - an early internet chat platform - I used to get lots of unsolicited IM's - it was brutal, frequent, and annoying.

Bloggers have also found that their blog software has been targetted by spammers. Spammers misuse the "comment on this entry" feature to paste in spam messages. People tend to refer to this as "comment spam" - I'll call it "cram" for now. Cram has gotten bad enough that blog software companies have had to offer tips on how to reduce cram - as well as repair software flaws for vulnerabilities that allowed spammers to also email spam through the comment engine.

So not only am I an email user, an IM user, and a blogger - who is therefore dealing with Spam, Spim, and Cram every day, along comes Spit. Read Aunty Spam's account of Spit.

What is Spit? Simply put it is VOIP (Voice Over IP) Spam.

For broadband telephone service customers - of which I recently became one through Lingo - this is an exploit that occurs when you are speaking with someone.

The "Spitter" basically hacks into the call, in a way that the caller can't hear but the receiver can, and plays Audio spam to the person you called.

It may be the most annoying type of spam and I hope it does not become prolific. Services like Vonnage and Lingo should be doing all they can now to eliminate or mitigate this vulnerability.

As of yet, I haven't been "Spit" on - and I hope it doesn't happen. This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on.

More on Spit via Google if you are interested.

Posted by gcrgcr at January 28, 2005 9:57 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.tombartel.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/34

Comments

Post a comment