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

Plus, SMS Spam

[SRA8]

If it wasnt bad enough get 10 to 15 stock "tips" via spam a day, in mid-December, i started getting the same stock spam via SMS! Yes, SMS! I got a burst of 6 one morning, then another 5 later in the day. Theres $1.10 of SMS fees courtesy of Cingular. I cancelled my SMS service (which they enable automatically) immediately. Wonder how many people are unknowing getting charged for these messages. Starting January 07, Cingular will start charging 0.15/sms -- perahps a response to record SMS revenues :-) ?

Bandwidth

[tef]

If for example each spam message was around 1k of info, that's on average 63 tera bytes of info! Using the new Seimans 107gb speed record connection, that would take almost 10 minutes to transfer all that spam! I just wonder how much faster the internet would be without spam.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[dgatwood]

That's definitely one approach. Unfortunately, it means that my mail would then be at the mercy of a thousand servers' bandwidth, and that reading my mail would take a lot longer on the average as a result.

What we really need is E2EASMTP: End-to-end Authenticated SMTP. The design is basically just the existing SMTP. The only changes are as follows:

1. All mail servers require an SSL key. This is assigned by the registrar when you purchase a domain. This key may be shared among multiple hosts within the same domain.
2. All mail servers must require SMTP-Auth for outbound traffic.
3. All mail servers must sign each piece of mail as it passes through their systems. This signature must sign the complete message, including the signatures of previous servers in the path.
4. All mail servers must support an automated abuse handling mailbox, autoabuse@domain for responses to spam messages.
5. All mail servers must forward automated abuse messages appropriately by verifying its own email signature (sending an abuse bounce-back if it does not match) and then forwarding the abuse report to the mail server that send the message to it in the first place.
6. Upon receipt of a certain number (determined as a site policy) of reports of spam or other junk emails from a given user, the mail server should automatically email that user to notify him/her that his computer is compromised and block any and all emails from that user until it is reset.
7. All ISPs should take reasonable care not to reinstate mail sending privileges until they are sure that the user's computer is clean.
8. ISPs are encouraged to manually look at any blocked accounts as soon as they become blocked to make sure that the messages really are spam/phishing.

The key is that the entire abuse reporting process should be automated and that no email messages without an initial host signature should be delivered. This will make it impossible for continued operation of spam zombies in two ways:

1. It will prevent them from sending mail directly by running an SMTP server on the compromised computer.
2. It will prevent them from continuing to send mail through an ISP's mail server by ensuring that the mail messages can be traced back to a single individual user of the originating ISP, where the messages will be automatically blocked in a timely fashion.

In effect, by ensuring a trusted (albeit not necessarily encrypted) path for all email messages, you make spamming orders of magnitude harder with minimal performance impact. Best of all, I think that this could be implemented with relatively minor additions to the SMTP protocol and phased in over a period of time, ensuring a smooth transition from the spam nightmare we have now to a more modern, usable email infrastructure.

Anyone can use gmail's anti-spam too!

[a16]

Something worth pointing out to people who don't want to use gmail, is that you can use gmail as an enterprise grade anti-spam filter for your personal inbox.

Simply forward all of your mail on to gmail, and then either collect it from gmail using POP3, or set gmail to forward it back to a "clean" account on your server that you can pick mail up on. You can set gmail to delete the mail after it forwards it, so you essentially get one of the best anti-spam filters out there, for free.

Of course, what is annoying me is all of the penny stock image spam that gets through most spam filters. It's getting to the point where I really am considering stripping image attachments from messages. See this post further down for a bit more on my thoughts on image spam.

Re:I use a different approach.

[Nogami_Saeko]

I'm running my own mail server and using a system I read about which delays the initial SMTP "HELO" for 20-30 seconds before acknowledging the incoming connection.

If someone is sending spam, they're not going to wait that long before starting a new connection (it would slow them down something fierce, to maybe only sending 1 or 2 emails a minute).

This catches about 75% or more of the spam coming in - anything left is mopped-up by either spam assassin at the mail server level, or POPFile before my email client.

Sort of a 3-tiered approach. Very little (maybe 1 or 2) spams per-week get through.

N.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[shadowmas]

this is an excellent idea. but rather than having the registrar generate the SSL keys why not add them to the dns like in spf. this would allow the admins to generate the keys the way they want and if somehow a key is compromised (one of the mail servers gets stolen/hacked) they can quickly and easily generate a new key. also it would be valuable if you could have different keys for different servers.

Real status from a Financial Institution

[Lokatana]

I run an enterprise level messaging department for a large financial institution.

The increase in November of 35% is pretty accurate - but where the real story is is when you look at the 6 month trend.

In July of 2006, my enterprise was blocking approximately 20 million spam messages per week. Last week, we blocked 86 million spam messages - over 400% increase in 6 months.

Most of the growth occured in September & October. We're projecting to hit 100 million per week by the end of January.

The only good news here is that the amount of valid email that we're letting into our enterprise is remaining flat, indicating that pretty much the entire increase is successfully blocked by our anti-spam. *whew*.

-Lokatana