Xavier Media®

This is the 4th part of our series about life online back in the year 2001.

Spam

In 2001 the worst with spam was still email spam and you couldn't post your email address on your web sites since evil spam bots crawled the web for new victims to spam . Also whois records where highly spammed and because of that a new million dollar industry saw the daylight: Whois privacy services. Many newbies noticed the bad idea of listing their real email address in the whois records since as soon as a domain name got registered it didn't take long before you started getting spam to the email addresses listed in whois records . Today we rarely see spam to email addresses listed in whois records and that may be because of the whois privacy services out there. Spammers may have figured out the poor response rate due to the fact that none read their spam.

At this point spam filters got more and more popular to filter out all the email spam. Today you rarely get email spam if you use services like Gmail, but in 2001 I got over 200 spam email per day to just one of my email accounts (before I activated spam filters ).

Spam in forums wasn't that common yet. I guess spammers changed tactic when they noticed the decreasing response rate for email spam. Back in 2001 countries like Bangladesh and many parts of Africa (big sources of spam these days) weren't fully connected to Internet and broadband Internet access where expensive. Unluckily that changed and together with cheap labor we experience forum and blog spam like never before.

Yet Another SQL Injection

You never saw any injection problems with databases and scripts in 2001. Of course it happened once in a while, but not like today. Today it's big business to find and abuse vulnerabilities in insecure code (especially where you can inject evil code in an SQL database). Most hacking attacks that happened in 2001 where "for fun" or to prove a point, but today it's a big business industry . If you search for "Yet Another SQL Injection" in any search engine you'll see it's way too common today .

I think it took until about 2003 or 2004 until I experienced cross site scripting for the first time.

I miss the good old days when you din't have to secure your code in 1,000 ways before you released it. Now you have to code way too many lines of code before you can release the exact same function .

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.