Spam Wars: The Battle History

HTTP: The World Wide Web gets Spammy.

The only constant in the Great Spam War is change.

Perhaps now we (tinw) will see street corner dealers selling/hawking/pushing monthly Bullet Proof Hosting to those hooked on spamming, a known and destructive addictive behaviour.

-- Sun Tsu - The Art of War

Spam encroached on the WWW, the more commonly known used parts of the Internet through two approaches. During the battles for Usenet and Email, as Relays were closed a new source of source obfuscation was needed by spammers.

HTTP Provided this in the form of Open Proxies. Machines which given a CONNECT command and a location would redirect all following information to that location and its responses back to the requestor.

Like Open Relays, they often did not report the location of the original request and could be used to send Email and Usenet Posts.

It is currently not recorded when the first spamsites appeared. But, with the advent of content filters and the need of spammers to sell their products they began creating website that contained all the sales details and spamming only a link to the site with some text easily moulded to get around filters.

Since 'The Internet' became a part of popular culture and knowledge of Usenet declined the WWW started growing 'Message Boards' or 'Forums'. Much the same in content as the original usenet groups, forums have since been abused by spammers in much the same way.

Early in the 2000's, at spams the webgrew a fad of Blogs', essentially a persons log or diary posted live on the web for public viewing. After initial success in forum spamming, the spammers soon found ways to abuse these systems too.

Spammers post a message linking to their spamsite to thousands of message boards and blogs across the web. This has a two-fold effect. Not just spamming people who see the link, but also corrupting the WWW archives (wayback machines) and search engines which rank pages by popularity based on number of links from other sites.