Cybercrime and Spam: Analyzing Cybercrime and Spam's Interconnection

This report delves into the intricate relationship between spam and cybercrime. It begins by defining spam and its potential for malicious intent, highlighting how seemingly innocuous spam messages can serve as gateways to cybercrimes. The report explores various forms of cybercrime facilitated by spam, including phishing, where users are tricked into sharing personal information; identity theft, where spam messages are used to steal personal data; and ransomware, where spam emails are used to block access to a device until a ransom is paid. The report emphasizes the interconnected nature of these cyber threats and the need for comprehensive cybersecurity measures to combat them effectively. By examining the common origins of these cybercrimes, the report suggests that a unified approach to cybersecurity could save users considerable time and money. The report references relevant research, including studies on the economics of cybercrime and the mining of spam emails for forensic applications.

Spams and Cybercrime
Spams and Cybercrime
A spam is an unwanted and redundant electronic message that is sent in the context of an
advertisement to a number of random users. Spam messages generally have a suspicious
intention and generally advertise shady products or sweepstake messages which promote
gambling. The intention of this research paper is to identify how these spam messages are
related to Cybercrime.
Any criminal activity that takes place with the help of a digital device or that uses
computer technology can be categorized as Cybercrime (Anderson et.al., 2013). Now how
can an unassuming spam message become a source for something as serious as
Cybercrime? Spam messages may sometimes intend to access the personal information in
a computer. In such a scenario, the spam message can gain vital information like a
person’s credit card information. If the spam message has access to the user’s identity, it
can be categorized as a kind of cyber crime called as identity theft. A few spam messages
induce the user to share his personal information. This is called phishing and the personal
information that the user shares could be anything like his user name, bank account details
or even his password (Wei et.al., 2008). Another extreme form of cyber crime activity,
which is far more serious than the above mentioned one’s comes under Ransomware. A
ransomware is a program, sent in the form of an email which blocks the access to an
electronic device till a sum of money is released. The computer may contain a lot of
crucial information and hence the security of this system could not be compromised.
Most of the spam messages that we encounter advertise certain games or sites that
promote gambling or give links to pornography. These sites may have paid subscriptions
and may be unsolicited and unauthorized. Subscribing to these sites may threaten the
security of the user and his personal data. The existing problem in having effective counter
measures against the threats of spam messages is that each of these problems stated above
are separated as different obstacles with different solutions. But all these problems of
credit card theft, identity theft, phishing or ransomware are inter-connected in some way
or the other. If there are potent and economical methods of cyber security measures, these
problems can be tackled effectively and can save a lot of money and time for the users.
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Spams and Cybercrime
References
Anderson, R., Barton, C., Böhme, R., Clayton, R., Van Eeten, M.J., Levi, M., Moore, T. and
Savage, S., 2013. Measuring the cost of cybercrime. In The economics of information
security and privacy (pp. 265-300). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Wei, C., Sprague, A., Warner, G. and Skjellum, A., 2008, March. Mining spam email to
identify common origins for forensic application. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM
symposium on Applied computing (pp. 1433-1437). ACM.
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