Spam over Internet telephony. The (as-of-yet) hypothetical problem of unwanted telemarketing messages broadcast to thousands or millions of voice over IP users' voicemail boxes.
Also known as vam (voice or VoIP spam).
Unsolicited messages have plagued every mass communications medium, from the postal service to telephones to fax machines. Email and instant messaging are not immune to this problem. With the growth in the use of the Internet as a voice network, security experts are predicting the rise of junk voicemails, although the user base is small enough at the moment that spammers do not yet have an incentive to use it. One significant advantage of using a VoIP network to send marketing messages instead of land lines, is the greater ease and lower cost of sending one message to multiple IP addresses, instead of repeatedly sending one message to multiple phone numbers (which must be dialed separately).
Spit is not covered by the United States' National Do Not Call Registry for telemarketers, and because the messages have to originate as voice, it's not regulated as data under current anti-Spam legislation.
Engineers at Qovia, a VoIP network company, were investigating the feasibility of delivering broadcast messages (i.e., thousands of users) via a VoIP network. Qovia's CTO Choon Shim assigned a team to work on this challenge: it only took them two hours to build a program that could send spit-- enough messages to overwhelm and shut down a 100,000 phone volume call manager. Qovia moved to patent both the technology to do such broadcasting, and the technology to block such broadcasts.
Coinage of the acronym "spit" has been attributed to AT&T Security Scientist Kevin Kealy, although a Lexis-Nexis search has the phrase first appearing only in June 2004 in association with Qovia's press releases.
Sources:
SearchSecurity.com "SPIT." 9 February 2005. <http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,290660,sid14_gci1024458,00.html> 28 February 2005.
"SPITting mad: Qovia stopping voice mail Spam in its tracks."Telecommunications, June 2004, Vol. 38, No. 6; Pg. 10; ISSN: 0278-4831, 4242836,
Celeste Biever. "Move over spam, make way for 'spit.'" New Scientist. 17:18. 24 September 2004. <http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6445> 28 February 2005.
Susan Kuchinskas. "Spam, DoS Headed VoIP's Way." Internetnews.com. 23 August 2004. <http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/print.php/3398331> 28 February 2005.
Eric Lai. "IP telephone hackers can put spam in your ear." San Francisco Business Journal. Vol. 19, No. 28. February 11-17, 2005.
John Leyden. "Spam gets vocal with VoIP." The Register. 17 February 2005. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/spam_gets_vocal_with_voip/> 28 February 2005.
Deirdre McArdle, "Viruses and SPIT: coming to a phone near you." Electricnews.net 25 February 2005. <http://www.enn.ie/ffocus.html?code=9590536> 28 February 2005.