Spam from Beyond

Posted on | March 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

This morning I received an e-mail from an acquaintance who passed on a little over a year ago. Apparently she has come back from the afterworld to sell me and all of her e-mail contacts about various wonderdrugs and assorted pharmaceuticals (and at discount prices).

The online accounts of the dead have been in the news as of late because of a well chronicled debate at Facebook. Bit-rot, or the decay of storage media, is astonishingly absent in the news (and I suspect it will be a hot topic very soon, how many of you have tried to gain access to those backups you burned in 1999 lately?). The issue with clearly abandoned blogs/twitters is also a prevalent concern.

These are the paths that information can take after death on the web. Some will rot, some will be ignored, and others can be memorialized. But what happens to data on systems where they are routinely maintained (not left to rot), but also maintain the illusion of activity for a longer period of time; e.g. e-mail accounts; where administrators might not be so quick to pull the trigger on deletion. Where savvy spammers may be able to take a Infinite Monkeys Theorem approach to hacking a specific account.

I suppose there are two advantages currently:
One, spam for the most part is harmless. Though your friend may be deceased, you’ll likely know something is up and not open the e-mail. But what if you’re not aware- or were merely an acquaintance, but a there’s a real signature and a familiar name this message carries with it a certain imbued trust. Would you be more inclined to download that software, buy that drug- could using email addresses which have already built up a certain currency of reputation help spammers improve on their 1 in 12.5 million success rate?
Two, there aren’t a lot of actually deceased people’s accounts floating around the web.  Perhaps this is a generalization based on the ages of internet users; however, as the internet and e-mail seems here to say, its not hard to imagine a day perhaps fifty years in the future where millions of internet users are dying every day and not taking their accounts with them. Will that old professor of mine I hadn’t kept in touch with be able to persuade me to click on a malicious link?

Many will hope that by the time this becomes such a large problem, internet users themselves will be savvy, er skeptical, enough to not click on any link sent in an e-mail or buy something just because they had an e-mail selling it. Perhaps we’ll be all aware of the hallmarks of spam, but I am not so confident as I can think of many close friends and family members that I have to repeatedly caution against download that awesome free antivirus package.

Who knows, maybe one day when we say “zombie network” it might take on a completely different meeting.

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