E-mail spam on the rise, officials offer tips Published May 5, 2008 By Air Force Materiel Command Public Affairs WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- While theater goers are flocking to performances of Monty Python's musical comedy "Spamalot" as it tours across America, "a lot of spam" within e-mail inboxes is proving to be no laughing matter for Air Force and government employees. Spam is unsolicited and generally undesired bulk e-mail messages. Senders use spam for reasons ranging from advertising new products or services, to scams that bilk people of their finances. Increasingly, spam is used to download software to personal computers for malicious reasons. At Air Force Materiel Command bases, the number of spam e-mails has been increasing for months. Currently, 90 percent of all inbound e-mail messages are spam. For AFMC that means more than 100 million spam messages a month, a 400 percent increase over the past six months. Within AFMC, special filtering software deletes more than 98 percent of all spam. In some cases only suspicious attachments are removed. According to Lt. Col. Robert Henning, with Headquarters AFMC's Communications, Installations, and Mission Support Directorate, most spam reaching AFMC recipients is addressed to AFMC Distribution Lists. "This helps explain the recent widespread delivery, so we are exploring ways to tighten the use of distribution lists to help reduce external spam," Colonel Henning said. The potential damage from spam e-mails is the introduction of harmful attachments and Denial of Service Attacks. Colonel Henning said that a common tactic of recent spam e-mails is to get users to click on a Web link of a non-threatening Web site that has already been compromised. "From there, the spammer attempts to install malicious code and gain access to our desktops and laptops, bypassing our network boundary defenses," he said. "This is now a serious security threat." The colonel added that it's important for workers to know what to do with spam e-mails when they appear. "Recipients should send spam, as an attachment in a new e-mail, to their base/site network control center spam mailbox for analysis," Colonel Henning said. "Users at each AFMC base can obtain that e-mail address by contacting their client support administrator." Those assigned to Headquarters AFMC should send them to Spam@wpafb.af.mil.