Spam is Back With A Vengence

Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before. In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."

Comments

Spam filters can still cope

[gvc]

The volume of spam is definitely up, and most of it is pump and dumps from a very few distinct sources. In December, about 20% of the 30,000 spams I received were for one particular stock.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/21/231 4241

But it is wrong to say that this new spam requires radical new filtering techniques. That's what the spam solution vendors (whose press releases drive these /. articles) want you to believe so you'll buy their products. In general, word salads, obfuscated words and image spam do not defeat state-of-the-art statistical filters.

See, for example, the recent TREC tests: http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/trecspamtrack06

These results show that filters achieve about the same results on 2006 spam as on 2004 spam, and those results are pretty good. Ongoing tests show that the effectiveness of filters is unchanged for 2007. In general, the volume of spam has increased, and spammers have tried various methods of defeating spam filters. But their efforts have not been particularly successful against statistical filters.