A Ninja may save us from the zombies on campus

By: Johnathan Skidmore
Copy Layout Editor

 No, this is not your average building-jumping, star-throwing, mysteriously black-clad ninja; this is an electronic ninja, crusading for the students and destroying spam on campus. And no, this isn’t your garden-variety zombie, either. These zombies exist on our campus as zombie computers. “Zombie computer” is the term applied to computers that send out spam unbeknownst to their owners. These computers are usually infected with some sort of spyware or trojan which uses idle bandwidth to send spam e-mails from bogus e-mail accounts

Spam. It is something that every student must deal with on this campus. No, this is not in reference to canned ham making an appearance in the cafeteria; this is in regards to junk e-mail appearing in our campus inboxes. The term “spam” is derived from a Monty Python sketch in which the word “spam” constantly pops up in the dialogue, much like spam in one’s e-mail.

Recently, Monmouth College students have noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of spam in their student e-mail accounts. This increase was due to the fact that the original built-in spam blocker the college was using was deemed no longer practical and, as a result, was disabled by the information systems center.

Monmouth College has been facing a virtual bombardment of electronic mail that is perpetually on the increase. Just prior to the disabling of the old spam filter, these numbers increased to the point of overloading the spam filter. According to Daryl Carr, executive director of information systems, “The number of incoming e-mails rose well beyond the ability for the gateway to process and deliver e-mail in a timely manner.” This resulted in the delayed reception of e-mails, oftentimes taking several hours for an e-mail to reach a student. The old spam blocker was shut down in order to alleviate this congestion. The information systems center has begun the trial process to select a new higher-capacity spam filter which will better meet the needs of the college campus.

This test system of a new spam filter, comically titled “Ninja Spam Filter,” was installed over a week ago on Thursday, Oct. 19. “The changes should have been immediate. The number of spam should have dropped dramatically. The system builds some folders in Outlook that are used to hold and manipulate quarantined spam,” said Carr.

Ever since the Ninja was introduced on campus, students have noticed much less spam appearing in their inboxes. While the Ninja still misses spam here and there, it is being fine-tuned and adjusted to counter the constantly-changing nature of spam e-mails.

“The new test spam filter works the same way that the old one did except that this one can determine if an incoming e-mail has a valid MC address. The old system was a gateway filter that could not distinguish valid MC addresses,” Carr continued. This new system, if it is officially selected, will allow e-mails with the “@monm.edu” ending to essentially bypass the filter, thereby creating less stress on the filter system as well as reducing latency between transmission and reception of e-mail between members of Monmouth College.

The Ninja has had a few initial problems filtering all of the e-mail received on campus and failed sometime on the morning of Friday, Oct. 20, just one day after its trial installation. The information systems center moved quickly on this matter and within a few short hours had the system running properly. It has since then not failed.

The Ninja may be exactly what the college is looking for to help defeat the spam-spewing zombies, but only time will tell.