스팸피해의 실태와 대응에 관한 고찰

A Study on the Situation of ‘Spam’ and its Legal Measurements

Spam mail, also known as junk e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail(UBE), is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that e-mail is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail). E-mail spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s. Botnets, networks of virus -infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. Since the cost of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising. Spammers collect e-mail addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. They also use a practice known as "e-mail appending" or "epending" in which they use known information about their target to search for the target's e-mail address. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Spam averages 78% of all e-mail sent. This article is about the situation and legal measurements of 'spam' in Korea.