GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - World Celebrates 30 Years Of Spam!!!

30 years .....

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Washington, D.C. (AHN) - It all began 30 years ago today. The mother lode of all spam - the bane of everyone's online existence - was first sent out via the U.S. Defense Department's Arpanet by a salesman named Gary Thuerk.

The first junk mail or "Spam" as we know it today, was an invitation for a demo of the new system-20 mini computers being marketed by the Digital Equipment Corp.

Thuerk was the ingenious salesman who thought of "mailing" the invite to 393 users on Arpanet, the predecessor of today's Internet, much to the consternation of the recipients -- who happened to be top officials of the U.S. military and university researchers.

Thuerk immediately lost his job in May 1978, but it wasn't until 1993 that unsolicited emails were christened "spam" by Usenet chat system administrator Joel Furr.

BBC News reported that Furr's epiphany was inspired by a Monty Python sketch on processed meat which ended with a group of Vikings chanting: "Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam."

Reports said the following year saw a leap in the spam industry when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel transmitted unsolicited emails to more than than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups.

Thirty years on, according to Internet security and solutions provider Sophos, spam has evolved into a backdoor marketing industry that transmits about 100 billion scam messages every day.

"Spam is a burden on all of us," said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley in the BBC report, adding: "What's worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware."

In its latest Security Threat Report, Sophos revealed that there are 23,300 new spam-related webpages per year, with a new one discovered every three seconds.

Further, it said 92.3 per cent of all emails transmitted in the first quarter of 2008, was spam.

Spam messages maybe sent by hacking home computers which have been compromised by a computer virus.