Hello? Spam calling

Honolulu, Hawaii – When you’re working at the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL) at the University of Hawaii, you quickly learn a number of important facts about Spam. Here we’re talking about the canned spiced ham product from Hormel, which is extremely popular in Hawaii.

Apparently as a legacy of World War II, when meat was hard to come by, Hawaiians turned to Spam, which rapidly became a comfort food. Now, going to lunch can mean, among other things, Spam sushi.

Unfortunately, out here in the mid-Pacific I’m not protected by my usual layer of tightly configured firewalls and spam filters, so another type of spam abounds as well — the kind that offers to do everything from erasing debt to enlarging various body parts. I get hundreds of messages like that every day, and it takes hours to kill all of it. Clearly, enterprise IT managers already have their hands full. But while they were fighting the seemingly relentless tide of e-mail spam (not the Hormel kind), another threat has begun to appear: wireless phone spam.

Right now, the problem is only beginning. Spammers, perhaps frustrated by declining results with e-mail, are starting to turn to SMS (short message service) text messaging and phone e-mail to send unsolicited messages. These are different from telemarketing calls in that they arrive unbidden, and they arrive with a price. Under most wireless phone plans, you have to pay for receiving text messages, regardless of whether you’re getting messages from your boss or from a spammer.

The problems this creates for the enterprise are twofold. First, there’s the extra cost and lost time in dealing with unsolicited messages. The second is that unsolicited e-mail can contain viruses and worms that can either work with the phone or be transferred to employees’ computers when they sync their schedules, phone lists, or other information. Sounds unlikely, I know, but not out of the question. After all, who would have predicted today’s spam and worm problems just 10 years ago?

One company that has found a way to deal with this threat is TeleCommunication Systems (TCS), which has a spam-fighting Internet gateway for mobile phone systems. The gateway is located at the Internet firewall in your carrier’s facility, but you get to determine what constitutes spam for your company. In addition, you can determine what does NOT constitute spam, so you don’t have to worry about your sales staff claiming that the spam filter caught all the messages from their manager.

Right now, the TCS gateway does not protect against mobile-phone viruses because they’re still pretty rare, but it will take on that duty when the viruses start being more of a problem. For now, at least, you can already protect your users — and your budget — from yet another source of spam.

Fortunately, that information has no impact on sources for Spam. Oliver Rist and I are heading out in a few minutes to see if we can find some Spam musubi (the official name for Spam sushi) for lunch. I bet it’s much more palatable than its digital counterpart.