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AOL Blocks 2 Billion Spam/Day

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-just-flat-out-scary dept.

T_moz writes "According to this article AOL has blocked over two billion (2000000000) SPAM emails in one day!" This figure is 70-80% of all mail incoming to AOL users. Utterly insane. Unfortunately, all this blocking means spammers will just send more mail to make up for it until a real solution is found.

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. no wonder by DanIncognito · · Score: 4, Funny

    No wonder I can't get any help with my nigerian bank account problems!

  2. Want a solution? by DA_MAN_DA_MYTH · · Score: 5, Funny

    Execute a spammer. It's clean, it's quick, and it's efficient. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

    See if people will keep sending unsolicited email then. Matt Groening had it right with Futurama.

    Computer: "You've got mail!"
    Leela: (Groans)
    Computer: "It's not spam!"
    Leela: Ohhh

    --
    "It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
  3. Good for them!!! by iwillrefuse · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now, if I could only stop these assholes who send me unwanted CD-Rom's to my home 3 times a month...

  4. That's emails, not spams. by AnotherBlackHat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Funny how nobody ever mentions the false positive and false negative rates in these stories.

    If AOL has a false positive rate of 0.01%,
    That means over 200,000 incorrectly blocked emails per day.

    If they have a false negative rate of 1%,
    That means over 20,000,000 spams got through.

    2 billion sounds like a big number, but it's still only 10-30 spams for the typical AOL user.

    -- this is not a .sig

  5. That's just the tip of the iceberg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Two billion every 24 hours is about right. AOL has LED banners in their offices that show the daily spam count.

    There is the graph they have on the wall in one of their Dulles offices that shows how the filters are working. It's scary, when a new type of spam filter is put out, AOL mail traffic decreases about 60%. The graph line plummets. Then, you watch it creep and spike until barely a month, maybe even a couple of weeks later, it's back up again. The spammers have found another way around it. People joke and laugh about AOL and spam, but AOL is really serious about getting rid of it. It costs them uncountless piles of money just to keep spam from breaking down their walls.

    I have also attended some pretty heavy security conferences about spamming for ISP folks. It's not just a mail flood technique anymore. Spammers are not just some freak in China with an ISP who looks the other way, some spammers are actually crackers. Crackers who break through an ISP's security, just to get around mail filters, or relay it from within. Some of the spam you get is not just because the ISP didn't filter it, it's sometimes because some cracker found a new way to bypass the filter, a back door to the ISP's internal services, so they send it in, even relaying spam from personal accounts. These are not script kiddies doing this, there are bonafide hacking geniuses working as spammers.

    Spam can shut down an ISP, and AOL knows that all too well.