Malicious Spam Jumps To 3B Messages Per Day

Trailrunner7 writes "Last year saw a monstrous increase in the volume of malicious spam, according to a new report (PDF). In the second half of 2009, the number of spam messages sent per day skyrocketed from 600 million to three billion, according to new research. For some time now, spam has been accounting for 90 or more percent of all email messages. But the volume of spam had been relatively steady in the last couple of years. Now, the emergence of several large-scale botnets, including Zeus and Koobface, has led to an enormous spike in the volume of spam."

Comments

Re:charge for email

[smallfries]

If you're going to use the check-list then at least fill it out right:
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it

Bill actually suggested this a couple of years ago.

Re:Oh really?

[martinbogo]

Until you take into account that the total number of legitimate emails is between 100 and 300 million messages per day. Spam messages make up over 90% of the total stream, and that means untold amount of wasted bandwidth, processing time, and frankly wasted time on code needed to combat the issue.

Hosting mail forwarding is ridiculous too!

[TheNarrator]

I have a domain name that I do mail forwarding for. Some botnet owner decided it was worth finding emails to spam to on this domain. So now every single day, 24/7 365 days a year, once or twice a minute I get an attempt to send an email to fsdfs34@mydomain.com where fsdfs34 gets replaced with every possible email conceivable. At first I decided to add an ip blocker for anyone who spammed me, but it soon slowed down my mail server so much that I had to take it out once the list grew into the 10s of thousands of ips.

Now I just greylist and tightly check EHELOs which seems to keep any of the spam from getting anywhere. Nevertheless, the attempts come relentlessly and continuously like clockwork form ips all over the world.