How do spammers conceal their identities?
A. SMTP is a standard Internet protocol used to transfer email messages between servers. It captures information on the route of a message, but lacks security. Spammers can exploit this by altering an email’s origin. The headers of an email message can be spoofed to make it look like the message is from an innocent party. Bot networks or zombie drones consist of many compromised systems running malicious software. This software propagates throughout the network, just like a virus infecting innocent Internet users. Once this program has infected a computer, a spammer can remotely control the computer and send spam from it. Other ways spammers can conceal their identities is by taking advantage of an organization’s SMTP servers that are configured incorrectly, leaving them vulnerable as open proxies and open relays. An open relay, sometimes called an insecure relay or a third-party relay, is an SMTP email server that allows third-party relay of email messages. By processing email that is
