How much spam are students not getting?
Nearly 1 million e-mails are addressed to Utah State University accounts every day, but about 80 percent of them are classified as “spam” and never reach their targeted inboxes because of Security Team Coordinator Bob Bayn and a Barracuda.
“The junk comes from all over the planet,” Bayne said.
Spam is the transmission of unsolicited commercial messages to thousands of recipients, Bayn explained. USU’s Information Technology department also attempts to block phishing, where e-mails appear to be from legitimate enterprises and are sent to recipients in order to get them to surrender private information.
The IT department at USU houses five machines, each about the size of a VCR, which sort and delete messages categorized as SPAM. Known as Barracuda, these machines recognize solicitous e-mails from known spammers and block them from getting into student and faculty inboxes, Bayn said.
If it weren’t for these machines, inboxes would receive five times the solicitation they do now.
“I can’t imagine trying to function without the Barracuda appliance,” said service desk consultant Nancy Roberts.
The Barracuda is updated hourly with new versions of blacklist, virus and spamming information, Bayn said.
Of the 20 percent of messages that make it to their destination, a little under half are labeled as spam, with “(SPAM?)” appearing in the subject line. This designation means the e-mail referenced a known spammer or had a link to a known spamming Web site, but wasn’t clearly spam. Each e-mail receives a score, and if it is above 4, it is labeled, but if it is above 8, it is blocked.
One method spammers use to get past blockers like Barracuda is to purposefully misspell words so they’re still recognizable to readers, but not to software.
Bayn said some phishers even attempt to impersonate USU to send viruses or phishing messages.
“The real IT services at USU will never send user information about their account in an attachment,” Bayn said.
Interior design major Nikki Lusty said she receives 50 to 60 SPAM messages a day.
“It fills up my inbox and I have to sort through it to find e-mails that actually mean something,” she said. “It’s annoying.”
Most commonly, phishers create Web sites that look like real Web sites, but are really facades used to get private information. They send out e-mails with links to Web sites that look like bank or pharmacy sites, asking for log-in or credit card information.
Bayn said adjusting e-mail filters is one way students can limit the number of SPAM messages they are sent – though the stronger the filter, the more likely they are to block some mail they actually want.
“This system protects them from the bulk of it,” Bayn said.
Each Barracuda machine costs $4,000 with an annual licensing cost of $1,600 per machine.
Roberts said the best thing to do is delete the messages that have “(SPAM?)” in the title rather than replying to the sender or unsubscribing from the sender’s list. Clicking on the unsubscribe link verifies that it has made it to an active account and the spammers are likely to send more.
“Whenever I’ve done that, I’ve only gotten more,” Lusty said.
Roberts said students who need help with SPAM should contact the help desk.
-mof@cc.usu.edu