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."
What about delicious 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)
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.
Am I the only one who read this headline and thought, "59 messages a day isn't so bad?"