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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. "
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
But this Bayesian strategy has been overcome by the spammers. They use hilariously strange word ordering trick the spam filter and lower their threshold (see Graham's Lisp code) down to an acceptable range. Here's a piece of text from some spam that made it into my mailbox this morning: And it goes on for about 7 paragraphs with absolutely nothing to do with its pitch. It's because of this nonsense that it makes it into my mailbox in the first place.
How do we eradicate this problem? What strategies do we use next?
Well, I would suggest that we stick to the Bayesian approach but instead of tokenizing via Paul Graham's proposed algorithm, we could investigate tokenizing the text based on letter groups (divide 'words' into 2-3 letter groups and test for those frequencies) or even natural language parsing. Yes, I know it sounds absurd but I really think that an engine could be written in Prolog using WordNet or another dictionary with some basic English rules in an attempt to parse and analyze incoming text.
Who knows? Perhaps our need for a spam filtering engine could breed innovation in the AI community?
My work here is dung.
It's not about the amount that comes to you, but rather the tactics being used. I think the spammers have learned to make it past Bayesian filters and, as a result, we can't just automatically dispose of mail. More and more of it is making into mailboxes whether it's attaching dummy text to fool the filters or just making the pitch come in the form of an image and using good text to get that image to the user.
Are your mailbox counts filtered or unfiltered? If so, what strategy is used?
My work here is dung.
I've been noticing a lot of the pump and dump spam recently, partly because non-existant addresses associated with a domain I own have been used as return addresses. I've also recently learned that the address of an academic website I maintain on a university server was poisoned on at least one major DNS so people accessing the website were redirected to a fake site that attempted to take over their machine. It's really getting rough out there.
I think 2 simple solutions can be combined.
1- As in IM, no one can email you if you have not emailed before.
2- For first time email, the receiving server could sent back a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaptchaCAPTCHA or a product of two large primes to factorize.
The captcha would be solved by the human sender, or the factorization problem by her MUA. Nowadays email is almost instantaneous, this would not add a noticeable delay. All the protocol could be implemented over current email protocols with little modification to existing software.
Pick a penny stock, but it cheap. SPAM a bunch of people, and hopefully, get them to buy the stock. The increased demand for the stock causes it to go up. Spammer sells, and thus profits.
Over the last couple of months the spam count on my mail server has gone from an average of 10K a day to over 20K a day. I had to turn off virus scanning and actually drop some of my spam filtering because the server couldn't process the mail fast enough. Now I'm having to upgrade the mail server hardware to handle the increased SPAM load. I'm sure I'm not the only one forced to do this.... SPAM gone from an annoyance to a financial problem.
Credit where credit is due: this article is from SecurityFocus. The Register just scraped it.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11420
-- http://frobnosticate.com
If we could OCR these incoming images, maybe that would eliminate at least the deluge of stock pumpers. I made the mistake of setting an autoreply on my account recently (at the server end). Now I get a zillion bounce-spams using my domain (I monitor a catch-all) and randomly generated usernames.
I think law enforcement should be working harder at catching spammers (internationally, if necessary) than they are at tracking down copyright infringers. Not because of any moral posture, but because I suspect the total economic impact of spam is greater than infringing use of content. I also think the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment should be lifted.
Hey, now that I come to think of it, maybe spam is a bigger issue than oil. I say we start invading countries with spammers!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I recently saw a surge from about 15 spams a day to well over 200. So, I got a spamcop account, and changed my email to go there, and then from there I forward it to where I read my email. Now I'm back down to about 15 per day. Spamcop catches the rest, and they land in my 'held mail' folder, where it takes about 10 seconds to report as much spam as I want. In the email account where I actually read my email, I pushed up the sensitivity of the spam filters, and now I see maybe two a day in my inbox. I just report the rest to spamcop.
Maybe we need bots to fight the bots. Bot Wars. In a galaxy far, far, away...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
If law enforcement really wanted to catch these pump-and-dump spammers it would be easy to do. Just investigate the people who have purchased large volumes of the penny stocks being spamvertised. I doubt anyone cares enough to do it, though.
Oh, and Slashdot? If you keep hitting me with animated advertisements that cannot be closed, I will be moving to Digg.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Let's face it, email is a broken protocol. It has no built-in safeguards against these kinds of attacks. The problem I'm seeing is that we're giving up and just saying it's inevitable, when it's clearly not. There's lots of good methods out there that stop spam cold in its tracks. Some sort of actually enforced sender ID protocol would be a good start. The problem is that everyone thinks the current system has too much inertia, and that it can't be replaced.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
We have seen a huge increase in the number of Joe Jobs lately, and as a consequence, our postmaster mail is filling up at record pace. Yesterday, I saw bounce notices from a single Joe Job coming in at several thousand a minute. Literally, thunderbird could not open my postmaster folder. I had to copy /dev/null into it, wait a few seconds, and open it with mutt if I wanted to see any of the data. Over fifty 50% of our processing time was spent sending mail to the postmaster admins, and we had a backlog of 25,000 messages. Our dual mail server beast could not keep up, fortunately, we found out why.
By default, sendmail uses a single queue runner. We found this, and not amavis, was our bottleneck. The single queue runner is fine for low and medium volumes, but fails miserably when presented with a huge volume of mail. So we fired 4 queue runners instead, and increased the number of available amavis children to compensate. The queue runners each have a behavior:
1) the default sendmail queue runner, starts at the front of the queue, and runs serial through it, then starts over.
2) tries to find the oldest members of the queue and process them first. Keeps stuff from being left alone for very long.
3) tries to find letters that are all going to the same mail server, and send them together. This one is awesome, as it opens a single tcp connection, and sends as many letters as it can. No time waiting for tcp handshaking per letter.
4) hops around the queue at random, and sends messages.
The combination of these four queue runners, and we have seen a huge increase in the load average on our mail servers, but we have also seen a great boost to performance. We are still seeing tons of postmaster bounces from Joe Jobs, but we aren't being slugged out by them anymore. If your mail server seems to be under performing, try this, it really does help.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
No. Bayesian filtering has failed, just like every other filtering method before it. Modifying it will not work. Adding OCR for image text will not work. Creating a new filtering mechanism will not work. The spamming will continue, more and more of it will get in.
Frankly, given that both processing power, disc space, bandwidth etc, are all increasing, I for one foresee the current spam/ant-spam arms race continuing indefinitely, with the amount of spam sent slowly increasing, and the amount caught by the filters being just enough to keep the amount of spam you get into your inbox at in and around a constant level. It's an endless cycle.
I say, turn it all off. All of it. The filters, the blacklists, the whitelists, Spamhaus, the lot. Let every single spam sent reach its destination, if just for one day. Let Joe Sick Pack finally realise the scale of the problem and just how much strain is being placed on mail servers. It will be both terrible and beautilful at the same time.
Then take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
May the Maths Be with you!
This is my own experience. I once got a library card, and gave my email address. Within a month I started receiving a huge amount of spam using my name, physical address, and/or email. I moved (for other reasons ^_^), and got a new library card. I set up an email address specifically for using as my library email. Same thing happened. In a few years I moved again, new card, new spam. I got a ticket. I gave my email address to the municipal court. Within a month, more spam. I worked for the state for a while. I set up an account specifically for that and had no mail until I had given the state the email address, and then I started getting spam. So, my thinking is, it is the government or at least my state government that has issues with security.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Not sure which CN/KR blocks you found...but if you want a complete listing, go to my site at:
http://www.okean.com/antispam/sinokorea.html
--Mike
Just to clarify, you can lose 8% a day, the Scammers can make 4-6% a day. I thought that I need to point this out, in case some silly fool gets the idea of following the scammers advice.
At about the time that allofmp3.com lost their credit card charging rights, I started to receive this spam at an address I set up just for their service announcements. Nobody else has it, so it's clear that allofmp3 monetized their email address list.