MANILA, Philippines -- Spam is almost as old as the Internet. For most us, it has become a natural part of the online landscape. We have come to accept it and learned to live with it.

Part of the blame, I think, should go to the email service providers and how they are for the most part able to keep those unsolicited and unwanted email messages stuffed and locked away in our Spam folders. The rest, meanwhile, should be assigned to the perpetrators themselves – how they operate their rather interesting business, including how they deliver their messages.

It is quite interesting therefore this look provided by a research paper at how spammers and other malware purveyors operate. Presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, the paper focused on a different aspect of cyber-criminals’ business operations.

Hit Them Where It Hurts

While previous looks at spamming operations focused more on their delivery systems – how they use botnets and hijacked computers to deliver billions of spam messages, this report highlighted spammers’ back-office operations, such as payment processing, merchant bank accounts, order fulfillment, and customer service.

During a three-month study, the researchers found that spammers were using 13 banks to process up to 95% of orders placed through spam messages, and that orders were fulfilled using 13 suppliers in four countries.

Sounds respectable business, these operators are running, except for the fact that they are selling cheap pharmaceuticals (of dubious quality and copyright status) and illegal or counterfeit copies of software mostly.

Researchers are calling on law enforcement agencies to go after the banks, and other parts of these operators’ back offices. They believe this would be the spammers’ proverbial Achilles’ heel.

Bill Gates Back

Lately, there has been lots of media noise about calls for Bill Gates’ return as Microsoft CEO. Some investors and industry analysts are increasingly calling for Steve Ballmer’s head. They claim Microsoft’s current CEO just does not have what it takes to run a huge tech company.

Microsoft’s drop from numero uno IT company in terms of market capitalization to second (behind Apple) and, recently, to number 3 (behind IBM), has added fuel to this clamor. What is funny is that almost everybody acknowledges that Gates lacked creativity during his tenure at Microsoft’s helm.

Despite this, those who want Gates back claim that Old Bill’s hugely competitive nature and willingness to take risks should help turn the software giant around like what he did at the early days of the Internet industry. That was when he transformed Microsoft from a PC-centric vendor into an Internet-enabled giant. Really, things in IT, like fashion, do not go out of style. They just leave for a while, but ultimately return in vogue – like wide collars and bell-bottom pants.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.