Evaluation of the CAN SPAM Act: Testing Deterrence and Other Influences of Email Spammer Behavior Over Time

• In Event: Prevention and Intervention Approaches to Cyber Crime

Abstract

Both email and email spam have experienced a growth that has paralleled the similar growth in technology worldwide. The CAN SPAM Act is federal legislation that was passed to regulate electronic spam. A series of reports and evaluations by cybersecurity firms and researchers followed in response to the passing of the Act to assess its efficacy, most of which were not positive about the Act’s success. However, none of these evaluations used methods that were sufficiently rigorous, failing to capture the continuous nature of the Act’s enforcement and only considering a relative few number of measures of spamming behavior. This research proposes to address all of these limitations by analyzing a sample of 5,490,905 spam emails gathered over a 16 year period. A time series dataset will be built from the spam sample utilizing 17 measures of spammer behavior, falling under the categories of spam volume, spam compliance with the CAN SPAM Act, spam severity (malware and fraud), and spam locality. Each measure will be incorporated into a multiple time series design and regressed on 11 measures of CAN SPAM Act enforcement, public opinion, and attention, all while controlling for multiple economic, technological, and related time series measures.

Author

• Alex Kigerl, Washington State University