![]() ![]() Professional spammers quickly rose to prominence because there wasn’t any anti-spam legislation in place until the early 2000s, when governments started regulating spam. In 1999, Melissa, the first virus that spread via Word documents attached to emails, wreaked havoc on the digital world, causing $80 million in damages. It reached pandemic proportions in the early 90s. This new context gave way to spam being used in reference to the same message being sent repeatedly to prevent other messages from getting attention or to push out other users in the same chat.īut spam didn’t gain notoriety until the rise of the Internet and instant email communication. ![]() The rise of chat rooms and Bulletin Board Services (BBSs) in the 1980s expanded the term when some users began repeatedly posting “spam” to consume screen space. There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that spam comes from a song in Monty Pyton’s Flying Circus with the lyric, “Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam.” In this scene, a group of Vikings in a cafe are singing about the ubiquity of the canned meat product after World War II. How does spam work, and what dangers does it pose? Most importantly, how can individuals and businesses protect themselves against it? Why is it called spam? Spammers keep updating their techniques to trick victims, so it’s important to be aware of their tricks. It takes up valuable time, lowers employee productivity, and fills up mailboxes. Spam consumes hard disk space, ties up memory, wastes bandwidth, and affects server performance. But it can be a threat when it’s used to spread malware or for activities such as phishing. And it isn’t always fraudulent or malicious. Oftentimes, spam is used for illegitimate advertising purposes. In 1978, the first proto-Internet spam email was sent, an advertisement for a new computer model from the Digital Equipment Corporation. It was a telegram advertising teeth whitening. How prevalent is spam? Image Credit: Smashicons for. ![]()
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