The Significant Decline of Spam

Orome1 writes "In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the world's pharmacy spam. Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December's daily average was around 30% less than September's. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%."

Comments

Seasonal variation

[oobayly]

I've noticed that spam & dictionary attack are seasonal. Over Christmas I saw less than 20% of the usual attacks on our servers. I'm guessing this is due to peoples bot-ridden machines not being switched on as much.

What really gets me is the amount of of dating spam that gets sent to an account I use for FreeBSD porting & CPAN. One would think spammers would avoid certain domains as they're only used by techies. Then again, maybe we're so desperate we'll jump at any chance of talking to a bird.

Re:I have a solution

[fridaynightsmoke]

Russia and Nigeria have oil.

But Nigeria's oil industry is already owned by Shell. And they're working with US government to plant agents inside the Nigerian government so that the cheap oil keeps flowing.

The linked leaked cable doesn't say that. What it does say is that Shell are/were concerned about Russia giving missiles and/or other weaponary to rebels intending to attack Shell helicopters and other installations etc, with a view to Gazprom taking over Shell's oil wells in Nigeria. Shell asked the US Gov. if it knew anything.