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Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the crazy-email-subject-lines dept.

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.'"

8 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Pump & dump for PHYA by gvc · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Pump & dump for PHYA by gvc · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    2. Re:Pump & dump for PHYA by cashman73 · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

  2. Re:I'd say more than 35% by sam_paris · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:I'd say more than 35% by epiphani · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  4. Re:Who reads it? by SQL+Error · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  5. Re:Plus, SMS Spam by QuantumRiff · · Score: 3, Informative

    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..

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    What are we going to do tonight Brain?
  6. Re:MOD DOWN by gvc · · Score: 3, Informative

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