Slashdot Mirror
Where Has All My Spam Gone?
An anonymous reader writes "I have my own domain, which has its own email server, where I receive all my personal email. I've been getting about 800 emails a day, of which perhaps 20 are real. Suddenly, Sunday or Monday evening, the spam pretty much stopped. My volume of mail has plummeted to less than 100 a day, and as far as I can tell, I'm not missing any real mail — I'm still getting the email list subscriptions I'm expecting, and every time I ask someone to send me a test message, it gets through. My domain host insists that it doesn't do any spam filtering before mail gets to my inbox, and that they've changed nothing about their configuration. I run SpamAssassin on my server to mark, but not delete, spam, and download the whole mess to my home client, and I'm still seeing the occasional message tagged by SpamAssassin. But it's virtually all gone. And I haven't changed anything about my own mail configuration, or the harvestability of my site (my personal email has been harvestable for almost a decade). So what's going on? I can't believe that several major botnets would have vanished overnight. Any ideas?"
I run a web hosting company and over the past couple weeks I've had a few customers report that the amount of spam has dropped. Of course, they thought that this was something wrong, but I couldn't find any evidence of increased failures, it was just that there was slightly less mail coming in.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/12/191255&from=rss
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/georgia-takes-a-beating-in-the-cyberwar-with-russia/
When the crisis abates, I expect the botnets will be returned to their regularly scheduled duties. Quite a versatile tool those botnets -- pimping V!agr4, collapsing government sites, enhancing the male doodad, distributing pr0n, bullying your neighbors (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6665145.stm). For the cost of one M1A1 tank tread, Putin bought himself a whole lot of firepower.
Advantage: Putin.
That might actually be a not bad idea. Sending him something that can be confirmed as having been sent, and as being spammy.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
I've just checked my work's logs (an ISP). The number of hits in the spam taggers fell from 12/sec to 3/sec earlier this week.
So either we're identifying less spam, or there is in fact less of it.
then he proceeded to escape, kill his wife & baby daughter (a teenager escaped) and then himself.
pretty crazy, no?: http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jul/26/spam-king-murder-suicide-surviving-daughter-in/
There's something to that, even if the original poster's claim of not having spam anymore is local to him through unknown upstream changes.
Its long been suspected that the Russian government and Russian organized crime have cooperative links, if not outright overlapping "membership" (Putin is FSA/KGB, and its well known that ex-KGB members have been deeply involved in the Russian Mafia).
With this in mind, its not hard to speculate that if botnets controlled by Russian organized crime were put use against pro-Georgian assets, the ensuing defenses, publicity and exposure at the political/military level could possible cause these botnets to be far more vulnerable than they otherwise would be in the course of normal criminal activity.
This higher level exposure might lead to weakening them and reduce their effectiveness at normal tasks like spam.
Its also possible they may also be overutilized and prioritized for cyberwarfare and not for spam.
After I read this article yesterday (single page), that's what I thought: given all the spammers that are Russian, there's a chance there might be a slowdown in spam as patriotic Russians "pitch in" by helping DDOS Georgian resources.
It's pretty amazing if you read that article how easy it was for just an average person to find out how to "volunteer" for the Russian army: independent helpers have made it so you can find out which Georgian sites you should ping in order to maximize your effectiveness, and have programs that you can download that do most of the work with minimal hassle.
However:
a) According to most posters, spam hasn't actually abated.
b) Spammers wouldn't do something as selfless as pitching in for their country.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.