US takes mobile spam and other abuse seriously

Rating: saving the goose that lays the golden egg

By Annie Turner

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will host a two-day public event entitled Spam Summit: The Next Generation of Threats and Solutions, in Washington, DC on July 11-12, 2007. It will bring together experts from business, government and technology, as well as consumer advocates and academics, to explore consumer protection issues surrounding spam, phishing and malware.

The two-day summit will explore developments in malicious spam, shifts in spamming incentives and tactics, strategies for protecting consumers and businesses, and countermeasures for stopping malicious spammers and cyber criminals.

Dave Champine, senior director of product marketing, Cloudmark, which specialises in securing infrastructure, will be speaking about messaging threats to mobile devices, which he calls, “the new frontier for abuse: mobile devices are becoming smarter, consumers and enterprise users are relying more on these devices to access email and corporate information, mobile messaging adoption is skyrocketing and major mobile carriers are beginning to offer unlimited text plans. All of these factors combine to make mobile devices increasingly vulnerable and appealing targets for spammers and hackers.”

Mobile spam, SMS phishing (or SMiShing) attacks and exploits on handsets are already appearing up in Asia and the big fear is that the problem is making its way westward to North America.

These are potentially very serious problems, but others exist already. As NeuStar’s VP of mobile marketing, Diane Strahan, told GoMo News at CTIA in March, “The regulation against spamming is being broken every day. People are marketing through SMPT [the email protocol] and you’re not supposed to do that, only SMPP [short message peer-to-peer protocol] with the carrier’s approval.”

There have been complaints that operators don’t do enough to protect their customers from unwanted texts, but there are signs that they are beginning to realise that failing to stop it has big implications for them in terms of the regulator, churn and losing legitimate advertising revenue, particularly from the very image conscious big brands. Early this year Verizon Wireless won a permanent injunction against a company, Marketing LLC, which was believed to have sent almost 100,000 unsolicited spam text messages to Verizon’s mobile users. The court ordered Marketing LLC to pay damages of more than USD200,000 to Verizon Wireless, which doesn’t seem sufficiently punitive, but no doubt more prosecutions will follow.

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3. Anam and Telenor team up to defend against SMS Spam
4. Australian regulator Marketing company fines marketers over spam mobile calls
5. Surely mobile marketing isn’t just mobile SPAM??