Spam Hits 95% of All Email

An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."

Comments

Summary only link

[Lord Grey]

The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.

My spam is still lame :-P

[danaris]

...also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place.

Huh? Where? Man, all I ever get are stupid Viagra spam and "O3M S0FTWARE!" (and variants thereupon).

Humpfh. Everyone gets pr0n spam but me.

Dan Aris

Re:My spam is still lame :-P

[blindcoder]

Do you recognise the girl? Then call her!
Do you recognise the canine? Then yes, that's bad.

Re:call me a cynic, but

[gammygator]

FWIW, about 90% of our e-mail has been spam... and we've seen a solid 50% increase in traffic over the past quarter. The numbers aren't that out of whack. quote: Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection... Good luck with that. Particularly with the avoiding spam part. If you come up with a foolproof method that actually involves using e-mail... I'm sure you'll be a lot richer than I am.

That's not an unrealistic number

[SaDan]

I work at an ISP and we do SPAM detection and elimination at our border routers. We scan both incoming and outgoing email, and will auto blacklist our own internal IPs if we detect SPAM.

The highest two-week percentage of rejected incoming email that I've seen broke 97% a few months ago. It's normally between 90% and 95%.

It's loads of fun dealing with this crap.

Why we can't stop spam with our current techniques

[damn_registrars]

We can't stop it because we aren't addressing the real problem. Spam is an economic problem. People send out spam because they make money off of it. And they will therefore continue to send out spam as long as they make money off of it.

If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators that are allowing the spamvertised domains to be established and hosted. If you can either prevent them from getting a cut off the action, or punish them severely for taking their cut, then you can stop spam.

Until then, if all we do is try to filter spam out, we'll just continue to see the costs of inaction. Beyond that, we're ignoring the fact that filtering has real costs, as well. Filtering doesn't prevent the spam from traversing the internet, and furthermore it requires human time to update as the spammers change their tactics.

Email is dead, long live Email

[kthejoker]

As email asymptotically reachs 100% spam, we will have essentially created a mechanism whose sole goal is to deliver us undesired ads and scams. Talking about spam detectors and blockers and blacklists is irrelevant. Why devote all of this energy to ensure that maybe 5, 10, or 20 people can contact you or your business a day? Or even 20,000, which only highlights the issue that separating spam from valid emails is just bad juju. Simply put, there is no solution to asynchronous communication that is not too tedious or too restrictive. We'd be a lot better off if we blew up all the email servers, and put all of the energy and cost savings into developing encrypted telepathy. You think I'm kidding.