Bot Nets Behind Recent Spam Surge

gsslay writes "Everyone must have noticed a surge in spam recently, particularly for stock pump 'n' dump scams. The Register reports that anti-spam companies have seen a 30% increase in the last two months and, more worryingly, more of this spam is getting through to mailboxes due to the spammers' change in tactics. Rather than use unsecured mail relays spammers are using bot nets, making spam harder to identify and eliminate. Bounced spam is also on the up, and some experts reckon it's past time to start worrying. "

Comments

Not noticing the increase

[suso]

Honestly, it was past time to start worrying about 2 years ago. Two years ago I was had the feeling that the rising amount of spam was going to cause significant problems to the point where mail servers would no longer be maintainable and the internet may become unuseable. But now here we are, nothing truely significant. More spam taking more space and driving the load up a bit on servers, but not necessarily cripling everything as we expected.

    I also haven't really noticed this increase that people have talked about lately. On average I receive over 11,000 spam messages a month to my primary email account. Here is the count per month for the past two and a half years:

2004-07: 9088
2004-08: 9057
2004-09: 8990
2004-10: 14318
2004-11: 9910
2004-12: 11521
2005-01: 11251
2005-02: 9381
2005-03: 10843
2005-04: 10084
2005-05: 11785
2005-06: 10987
2005-07: 10505
2005-08: 9333
2005-09: 9704
2005-10: 12329
2005-11: 12394
2005-12: 14934
2006-01: 13764
2006-02: 13235
2006-03: 14562
2006-04: 11946
2006-05: 14204
2006-06: 13801
2006-07: 9671
2006-08: 10395
2006-09: 11373
2006-10: 12221

New Sophisticated eBay Phising Spam Scam Wrinkle

[Nova Express]

Today I finally got an ebay phising scam spam e-mail that was almost good enough to fool me, if I hadn't been paying attention:

1. It looked like a real question from eBay.
2. It was actually for a real item I had listed (albeit a closed auction listing).
3. The contact name was a real eBay bidder, and clicking on the linked name brought up the actual eBay user's page.
4. BUT...clicking on the response button took you to a sign-in page on a phising site.

Most of the eBay phising attempts I get are pretty laughable, but this was good enough to be worth warning about, as someone has finally written a sophisticated enough phising bot to send these out based on listings.

So, if you weren't already doing this before, to answer eBay mail, go in through your MyEbay link rather than any mail link to answer eBay mail.