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What are some of the other types of spam?
Home » Internet Security » Spam and Spam Blocking » What are some of the other types of spam?Besides email spam there are a lot of other types of online spam that can annoy you or endanger your computer. The first type is Messaging spam, or what is sometimes known as “spIM.” Instant messenger programs such as AIM, yahoo instant messenger, and ICQ try to block as much spIM as possible, but still some gets through. This is most of the time targeted towards teenagers and young adults with links to music, movies, and pornography sites. Most of time this can simply be avoided by ignoring messages from people that are not on your buddy lists.
Another type of online spam is newsgroup or blog site spamming. A newsgroup is a site that you go to get condensed stories on various subjects. Spammers will insert advertisements into a list of news stories, sometimes repeating the same advertisements five or six times in a row. This causes many people headaches as they try to read through the news, having to stop all the time because of different advertisements. There is also spamming on blog sites, which basically do the same thing, but on a personal journal site. Most times people are unable to spam directly into the entries, but will be able to spam through the comments fields that are available.
Spamming has also become very prevalent in a multitude of other avenues: mobile cell phones, online discussion forums, chat rooms, online game rooms, and Internet phone services (VoIP). Internet browsers on cell phones and VoIP’s are predicted to see a high rise in spam activity in the coming years. There is also a high rise in “spamdexing” which is spamming within search engines. Websites, through the use of meta-tags that are hidden within the HTML on websites that describe what is actually displayed on the site, are increasing the chance of their website being high on searches because they falsify the information that is on their site. This level of spam affects users in a more passive way and may not annoy the individual user as much, but will cause a decrease in the usability of the Internet.
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