Varied Venues of Spam

Outside of the more obvious and widespread e-mail based spam, there are other venues in which spammers attempt to convey their messages.

One popular spamming medium is instant messaging services, such as MSN Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo Instant Messenger. Most sites that offer instant messaging services have public listings of users, called user directories, where one can search for people to chat with based on a number of different criterion, such as age range, geographic location, and gender. Unfortunately, this information is also be used by advertisers for demographic targeting purposes, which enables them to collect specific information about people, including their messenger username. All they need to do then is sign into their own IM service and send messages. Most messenger spammers have scriptable software that gives them the ability to send spam to millions of usernames at one time.

Another area that is vulnerable to spammers is discussion forums. In this situation, the spammer is one who simply posts repetitive messages over and over again, without any purpose of contributing to the topic being discussed.

In conjunction with posting off-topic messages, the spammer utilizes the ability afforded by the forum software to create a signature line that shows up at the end of each of their posts. So while they may not actually spam something in the post itself, they may hope to gain view to their signature line that does contain a link to elsewhere.

One relatively new, and significantly costly type of spam is cell phone text messaging. Due to the fees associated with the receipt of text messages, this can easily cause a financial burden to the cell phone owner.

Guestbook, wiki, and blog spam are also on the rise. In this scenario, a person gets their messages out by leaving irrelevent commentary on people's personal websites, especially if they feel that their message will get alot of traffic. This exploit is due to blog owners allowing their visitors to leave comments on blog entries made.

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