Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November

gregleimbeck writes "Spam volume soared another 35% in November, an e-mail security vendor said Thursday, and the month saw spam tactics that reduced the efficiency of traditional anti-spam filters. 'There's been a huge increase in spam volume,' says David Mayer, a product manager at IronPort Systems, 'from 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28.'"

Comments

Pump & dump for PHYA

[gvc]

It appears to me that the increase is almost all due to a small number of messages swamping us. One advertises the stock symbol PHYA and has no link. The scam is that if you Google for that symbol, there will be a full-width paid ad for a fake broker/analyst site. About 10% of my email for the last couple of weeks (i.e. over 100 of 1000 spams/day) advertises this stock symbol.

Re:Pump & dump for PHYA

[gvc]

P.S. Feel free to Google PHYA and click the ad. It costs them money.

Re:Pump & dump for PHYA

[cashman73]

Stock ticker PHYA belongs to Physicians Adult Daycare, Inc. They recently put out this announcement saying that they have nothing to do with the email spammers, and are trying to catch them.

Basically, the way this scam works is that the scammers buy a bunch of worthless stock (as in a few cents/share), then email fake stockbroker advice websites and fake advice emails to people, trying to get them to buy the stock. When the stock is worth a decent amount of money, the scammers sell and leave everyone else that bought into their so-called, "advice," with worthless stock.

Re:Pump & dump for PHYA

[cashman73]

According to Yahoo Finance, their ticker symbol is actually technically PHYA.PK. Yahoo's list of exchanges shows that the PK suffix is the United States Pink Sheets Exchange .

Also, in a bit of irony, did anybody catch the Avoid Scams link at the top of the PHYA info page that google links to?

Re:Pump & dump for PHYA

[IL-CSIXTY4]

Generally, these scams are done against "over the counter" or pink sheet stocks, which are not traded as part of any exchange.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[sam_paris]

i'd say try a different webmail provider. I get a LOT of spam per day, (about 100+) and 99.9% is categorised at spam by gmail. In the last month i would estimate i've had 2 spam messages hit my actual inbox. The rest were filtered out by gmail.

Outlook

[milo_a_wagner]

I'm no MS fan, but I have to admit, a quick bit of maths show that Outlook gets over 95% of my spam. Gotta hand it to them.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[epiphani]

You're missing the point - the spam rate is BEFORE filtering, not after.

I got around 100 per day back a few years ago. When i started forwarding to gmail, I average a spam folder of 4000 (it deletes spam after 30 days).

In the past two months, its gone from between 5000 and 6000 to over 15,000. I would agree, hella higher than 35% though. At my place of employment, we have a million mailboxes. We started running into a lot more problems with spam than usual about 6 weeks ago as well.

Re:Who reads it?

[SQL Error]

Most spam is sent out using hijacked Windows PCs - zombie networks - and costs the spammers nothing. So they ain't gonna stop.

Having said that, the level of obfuscation they have to use even now makes their ads almost unreadable. You want me to 3nl@rg3 my what?

Re:not for me

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, not since spammers wised up on the spam blockers and have been using embedded images. 99% maybe six months ago or so, but now I'd say 95% isn't bad at all.

Re:Plus, SMS Spam

[QuantumRiff]

Cingular charges for incoming SMS? Wow, my cell phone company, as well as all the others I know of in my area (no cingular) only charge for OUTGOING SMS messages.. Just for that reason! Cause pretty much any spammer can send an email to 1234567890@email..com and have the email forwarded as an SMS to your phone..

Re:It's that damn picture spam

[Conception]

Fuzzy OCR for Spam Assassin. It does a pretty great job on it.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[YGingras]

Kick spamassassin, rules based filters are not what you need to keep-up. Install greylistd and spamoracle. No more than 0.5% of the spam hits my inbox. Spamoracle will detect anything that isn't an image. Greylistd for some reason kill 99% of the images. Yeah spamers are lame and they could get around this setup but for now you have a pretty good solution that will take 30 mins to setup.

Re:MOD DOWN

[gvc]

Parent does not understand grandparent. The Google ad points to a stock market manipulator, not PHYA.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[kenb215]

When i started forwarding to gmail, I average a spam folder of 4000 (it deletes spam after 30 days). In the past two months, its gone from between 5000 and 6000 to over 15,000.

That is because gmail doesn't delete old spam anymore. I'm not sure if it is because the deletion function broke, if the old spam is being used to help train filters (i.e. spam that the user had to mark), or something else. If you go to the spam filter and look at the oldest messages, they should be from around October 23 at 7:00 AM (GMT).

Re:They hide from OCR, so why not detect that?

[Dr.Ruud]

procmail to the rescue:

    procmail code by Dr.Ruud
    -> procmailrc.anti-gifspam, or
    -> procmailrc.anti-gifspam.mini

Re:Plus, SMS Spam

[Alioth]

You get charged for *incoming* text messages? Ye gods! Run, don't walk - to a better cell phone provider who doesn't rip you off for what is essentially almost a penny a byte.