Email Crime

Email crime has many forms, but most email crimes have one main purpose. To deceive the user to do something, most often, to transfer money to the attacker. Sadly the current email architectures can only allow to filter out the bad e-mails into “spam” folder and can’t do anything more than that to prevent e-mails going into the user’s inbox. Most popular e-mail services can filter out good from bad e-mails, but it’s up to the user to decide whether or not to read them.

According to statistics, most of the e-mails that are sent and received by user’s are “spam”, but what is “spam”? Spam refers to bulk e-mails that serve no-real purpose for the receivers, because, most spams have no real recipient, they’re blindly sent in the hope that some user will read it and do what’s requested inside it. Often that is, to “verify” their bank account, receive an ad for a product, or to receive a large sum of money, but as a requirement, to send a small sum in order for the transaction to happen.

There is also another type of attack and that is specific to certain user. That is, pretending to be someone, also known as, “spoofing”, with the sender’s e-mail resembling the real one but with small modifications, for example, a small letter change, from john@… to jonh@… Those attacks are often not blind, and the victim is know ahead of time. The idea of those attacks is to make the user click on a link, or download a program and run it in order to steal information, or to gain control of the victim’s computer.

Another type of attack, again related to spoofing, is to bluff that the attacker knows something about you and wants “ransom” in order to keep it a secret, for example, the attacker might say that he knows that you’re involved in an affair and will tell your relatives if you don’t pay him in a short time window.