Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself

An anonymous reader noted that the times is running a piece on the rise in spam that you might have noticed in your inbox over the last 6 months. Gates promised the end of spam by 2006, but they figure it's doubled in the last few months. And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.

Comments

Bill Gates promised !

[Rastignac]

Gates promised the end of spam by 2006. He still has one month to succeed. It is still possible. I'm waiting. I really want to see that. Thanks, Bill.

It's the bottom line, stupid!

[Pig Hogger]

The crux of the problem is the penny-pinching network executives who prefer to run spam sewers where zombies thrive without any supervision.

Competent sysadmins are expensive, and the idea of, say blocking outbound port 25 would never occur to them, or is brushed-off for stupid reasons.

The only way out is to exerce pressure on those network owners and the best way to do so is by simply blocking them left and right until they are left with nothing but their huge intranets.

Re:It's the bottom line, stupid!

[David McBride]

My understanding is that botnets, mostly made up of weakly-secured home machines, are the source of the majority of spam. Thus the main problem is not network administrators not taking good care of their networks (which are usually quickly identified and isolated using blocklists), but rather the woefully insecure configuration of home desktop machines out-of-the-box.

And the blame for that can be squarely placed with Microsoft.

Re:It's the bottom line, stupid!

[A beautiful mind]

You're essentially correct. Greylisting results confirm what you say. The spam that goes through greylisting is miniscule compared to the amount it blocks, for now. The spam that gets through comes from hacked servers, open relays etc, which are much less common than a compromised windows pc.

The blame is mostly on MS. Partly in a different way than people think. MS advertises easy to use windows/computers, while that category is fiction. A computer is a complex tool. You can use it easily like you can use a chainsaw easily. The chainsaw eliminating a couple of your fingers is enough deterrent that most people learn to use it properly before that happens.

A computer is a chainsaw that cuts into someone's finger 2000km away in another country if not used correctly. The user stupidity only causes such big problems because the expectations are out of touch with reality. Computers are not easy to use and can't be made easy to use. Anyone who tells you so lies and sabotages the stability of the Internet.

What I'm talking about here is the "user stupidity" part of the problems. The Windows security side of the issue is another part of the problems. The "user stupidity" part is grave, because even if someone switches to Linux or BSD or something else than Windows, it is still easy to take over any system with a stupid user's cooperation. The answer is education and readjusting the common thinking about what computers are.

Spam 2.0

[choongiri]

"The new breed of spam -- call it Spam 2.0"

No, no, no... please, please don't!

Another problem

[Sv-Manowar]

Good to see them documenting the rise of email spamming, but I'm suprised the article doesn't talk more about the spammers who are running amock across websites rather than people's inboxes nowdays. While the problem of email spam is still growing, it has pretty much always been there and the public are fully aware of it (with mainstream services such as Gmail offering spam protection, etc), the huge rise at the moment is the amount of web applications and sites that are being exploited. Take for instance Youtube (with many of the most popular videos having their comment threads spammed hard), or any mainstream forum software (most commonly phpBB), where spam bots are continually developed to get around registration methods (including OCR) and then spam the forum with either their profiles or posts. Not forgetting the guestbook spamming which many of the people behind these use for SEO purposes, so they can get phising or product selling pages to the top of search engines (even if it is for a day or so before they are penalised/blacklisted).

While email spamming is still the main problem, it would be nice to see the mainstream media realise that there is a growing danger in people exploiting community websites nowdays, because all it takes is for one of these operations to install enough spyware/get traffic from sites/top search engines for banking/insurance etc websites, then they will start taking consumer's data faster than spam would - all without the majority of customers realising, because they think the main threat is in their inbox.

A solid solution

[east coast]

We can hire the A-Team to come in and stop them.

I pity the fool who litters Mr T's inbox with ads for home equity loans.

Fuzzy OCR

[Conception]

There is a plugin for Spamassassin called Fuzzy OCR. It's false positive rate is pretty low and I haven't seen image spam for weeks.

http://fuzzyocr.own-hero.net/wiki/Downloads