Spammers love iMessage: Apple's service blamed for one-third of mobile spam

Spam is pretty much one of the worst by-products of electronic communication. For one, once a spammer has your ID, they can continue targeting you through multiple vectors and more often than not there’s no way to stop them.

While email spam has been consigned to the junk folder in your inbox, what about text messages from telemarketers or just spam messages in a messaging app? Turns out, spammers have figured out how to game the Apple iMessage system to their benefit and that particular platform is now responsible for 30 percent of all mobile spam messages, according to one anti-spam company.

Tom Landesman, an engineer at Cloudmark, which builds security systems and anti-spam filters, told The Wired that iMessage is remarkably easy to set up for spamming activities. This is especially so because of its cross-device compatibility. For example, you can send iMessages to an iPhone from a Mac. So all an attacker really needs is a Mac, some knowledge of running a script on the system and the address of the targets. In 10 minutes, if you have a whole bunch of accounts, you’d be able to send a huge volume of messages,” Landesman is quoted as saying by the website .

What’s problematic here is that the entire burden for cleaning up the system falls with Apple, since iMessage doesn’t use the carrier’s network except for data connection. Apple has been stepping up its game in tackling spam by limiting the number of messages one can send within a given duration after the denial of service attack in March 2013. But that’s not the only problem for iMessage. It has been known to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks . Further, a lawsuit filed in the US against Apple alleges that users switching away from iPhones are not able to receive messages from their previous iPhone contact s due to an iMessage bug that doesn’t remove them from the system. Apple is yet to issue a fix for this issue.

It’s clear that iMessage, which is a solid messaging platform for all Apple’s devices, has some issues at the moment. And we could be in for a major overhaul in the next few iterations , especially in the light of the spam issue.