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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."
Because one person sending a mailshot to a hundred or so people looks a lot like a botnet.
One person mailing their CV to 200 companies can look a lot like a botnet.
One teenage girl telling everyone about a party can look a lot like a spammer.
Sure if the botnet isn't well written then it'll just blast spam out of every node 24/7 but the really good ones are going to try hard to evade detection.
Hell if you've got enough compromised PC's and you're organised as modern botnet herders are then you can collect a lot of good data on how regular users send email and make sure the nodes of your botnet avoid going far outside the curve.
That's why its best to use the middle way. Have own domain and some way to quickly create a new address on it (even if they all go to same mailbox). Always use a new address for different sites and purposes. That way if one of them starts to get problems with spam, you know who sold your address and can easily disable it.
SPAM was the absolute bane of my existence (I have several very public email addresses that have to remain that way) until the day I finally (at at the time reluctantly) decided to run all of my mail through Gmail accounts, without exception. I had used block lists, several ISP-based filters, spamassassin post-POP3 on my own local net, and a bunch of filters, and it was eating hours a day of attending to SPAM (new filters, fixing filters, marking as spam, marking as ham) and so many CPU cycles that a dedicated box couldn't keep up. Not to mention that due to the processing overhead of all that filtering, when someone did send me a message and told me so, I'd have to tell them "I'll get it in ten to fifteen minutes." And all for a few (three, really) email queues that belong to one person and a couple assistants?
Now I forget that SPAM exists, and my email comes in more or less instantly.
For a decade now, Google has more or less singlehandedly kept the internet usable.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
But it's my business to pay my ISP to funnel the bytes sent to me. If the bytes coming from your ISP are frequently evil, I'd fully support my ISP in blacklisting you, especially if it saves me money or increases my bandwidth.
So if your ISP decides to cut yours off unless they impose some sort of anti-bot policy, I'd be in favor. And I'm perfectly willing to have my ISP do the same to me if it's what's required to play nice with their neighbors.
If you want your ISP to be blind to your bits, and suffer the fact that they'll have to install more bandwidth and be potentially filtered (and lose customers for that, raising your prices further), be my guest. I'm willing to live with that minor invasion of privacy (cutting off obvious bots) in exchange for lower prices.