Slashdot Mirror
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."
And I still see less then 1 per month in my Inbox.
_THIS_ is the price I am willing to pay to allow Google to filter my email.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I'd rather have my ISP not be in the business of picking through my traffic and deciding what's "good" and what's "evil". Who I talk to over my connection is my business.
Let me know when you find a reliable way to...
a) Charge for email
b) Prevent unpaid mail from being sent
c) Prevent botnets from sending 30 free messages then stopping for the day
d) Prevent botnets from sending a ton of paid messages using financial info on the host computer
e) Prevent spammers from setting up a mail server that charges for messages, repeating d) and then collecting all the money.
etc, ad nauseum.
I've found that nurturing one's Zen nature is vital to dealing with technology. Violence is pretty damn useful too.
Yeah, we can see how much of a wonderful difference all those filtering programs that are on the market today are doing for the worldwide spamming problem. That is, no difference.
If you want to do something about the spamming problem, start looking beyond your own nose. Stop adjusting your filtering rules constantly. Pay attention to the cause of the problem - spam is an economic problem. Until something is done about the profit-motive (and the insane margins of profit) behind spam, the problem will only continue to grow.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Given the estimation that 90% of e-mail was spam *before* a five-fold daily increase, why aren't more people/companies clamoring for a complete e-mail re-architecture? Improved filtering and new spam laws are just symptomatic fixes - the entire way we do e-mail needs to change.
The resources wasted and stolen by spam are staggering. Eventually the economic and political incentive to adopt better e-mail protocols has to kick in; I'm just surprised it hasn't yet.
That's naive. Any cost savings get funneled right into the profit machine long before you see any of it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.