Most Spam Comes From Just Six Botnets

Ezhenito noted some research pointing out the (maybe) surprising bit of research that 6 botnets are responsible for 85 percent of the world's spam. That seems a bit high to me, but the only aspect of spam I am an expert in is *getting* it.

Comments

Sue the companies who advertise

[ThirdPrize]

While most of us treat spam as junk it is there to serve a very specific purpose. To get our money into the accounts of unscrupulous companies. A mate of mine (honestly) replied to spam and got some pills back. There are proper businesses behind them. Why can't we trace where the money goes and sue their butts off?

How many companies are actually advertising at any one time? Is all the spam for one company, ten companies, a thousand companies or a million?

Re:Anti-bots?

[MightyYar]

I was wondering whether it would help if Google (and maybe some of the other top 10) notified you when you showed up on one of the IP block lists with a big yellow box at the top of the page, like an IE alert: "Warning: Your computer has been reported to be a SPAM relay! Please clean up your computer with the following tools..."

Something like that. They could get the list of infected IPs from one of the black lists.

I'm not a network guy, so I don't know what kind of technical restrictions there would be... obviously this wouldn't work well with proxies - maybe NAT would be an issue as well? In any event, I personally would appreciate such a service, even if I got hit with false positives once in a while. Of course, the bots would eventually get wise and filter out the messages, but that's part of the fun of the war.