EMILIO FERRARA TRACKS THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL SPAM
ACROSS ITS MOST POPULAR APPLICATIONS, STARTING FROM
SPAM EMAILS TO MODERN-DAY SPAM. PHOTO/ISTOCK.
From a confidence trick originating in the late
19th century, to sophisticated AI that can
manipulate reality, recreating anyone's face or voice with
almost pinpoint accuracy—spam has come a long way.
But what does the future of digital spam look like, what
risks
could it pose to our personal security and privacy, and what
can
we do to fight it?
In a new paper, which appeared in the August 2019 issue
of Communications of the ACM (CACM)
, Emilio Ferrara, a USC
research assistant professor in computer science and research
team leader at USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences
Institute, tracks the evolution of digital spam and explores its
complex, and often surprising, history.
“The fight against spam is a constant arms
race,” said Ferrara, who specializes in computational
social sciences and is an expert in social media bots.
“Scams not only exploit technical vulnerabilities; they
exploit human ones.”
Social media spam bots, which automatically produce
content and interact with humans, have allowed spammers to
scale their operations to an unprecedented level. (Ferrara
explores this in his 2016 CACM paper, The
Rise
of Social Bots).
Since bots have been used for a variety of nefarious
scenarios, from manipulation of political discussions to the
spread
of conspiracy theories and false news, the stakes are high. In
the
future, Ferrara believes that deepfake technologies could be
abused by well-resourced spammers to create AIs pretending
to
be human.
Milestones in Spam History:
- The term “spam” is internet slang that
refers
to unsolicited commercial email (UCE).
- The first reported case of spam occurred in 1898, when
the
New York Times reported unsolicited messages circulating in
association with an old swindle.
- The first reported case of email spam occurred in 1979,
attributed to Digital Equipment Corporation and circulated to
400
users of ARPANET, the precursor network of the modern
internet.
- The term “spam” was coined in 1994, based
on
a now-legendary Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch,
where a crowd of Vikings sings progressively louder choruses
of
“SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!”
Facts:
- Billions of spam emails are sent every day.
- Email spam “detection algorithms” are
approximately 98% accurate, but new breeds of spam are
continually evolving.
- Last year, Facebook said it deleted 1.23 billion spam posts
in
2018’s third quarter.
