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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%."
Just set up some email routers to automatically append text that insults Muhammad to all SPAM messages. Pretty soon the spammers will all have their buildings burned down, their families threatened, etc. You just use one set of assholes to attack another set of assholes--the perfect solution.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Are we winning the war on spam, or are spammers(and their comparatively low returns) just being priced out of the botnet market by more lucrative cybercriminals, the DDoS extortion set, espionage agents public and private, various ideological axe grinders?
Given the fairly low-effort, fairly low-return nature of spamming, I imagine that it is sort of the botnet equivalent of a "screensaver" mode. More valuable than doing nothing; but priced out of the market once a more serious set of criminals comes along(especially now that there are relatively few fully legal spamming locations. This isn't the old days when the world's spam king was some American prick with multiple T1s running to his house, sending spam quite openly right out of his home jurisdiction...)
When I first got email in the late 1800s there were no junk filters. Today, I specify a single spam mail as junk and I never see that type of spam again unless I want to.
Spam less effective = less of it sent.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
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.
I've been getting significantly MORE spam in the last month. I would assume that they base their metrics on how much spam was caught and identified. Since apparently more is getting through to me now, the article should really be titled "Significant Decline of Spam DETECTION".
`fortune -o`
What I've never understood is how come the governments haven't ever gone after the companies hiring these spammers to spam their shit all over the Internet? I mean, if we're so gung-ho about stopping spammers, you'd think the obvious place to start would be the companies that are hiring these scummy assholes to do their bidding for them (I'm sure the spammers aren't just advertising other companies' products out of the kindness of their hearts)...\/1@gr4, I'm looking at you.
Comment spam hasn't slowed down. I think its because E-mail spam is starting to have such a low return ratio compared to getting spam in front of eyeballs via Facebook or Web forums.
For a spammer, cracking into a Facebook account, posting links up to a malicious website to distribute malware is far more lucrative than just spewing out and hoping the outgoing ISP, the relays, the user's mail server, and the user's MUA doesn't stomp the spam first. A FB account is almost guaranteed to be read, and oftentimes, the link clicked on.
So instead of 332 spam messages a day, I'm only seeing 296 messages? Not really groundbreaking for me.
Playing Whack-A-Spammer is a losing proposition. Someone will start up a service at least as big as Spamit, and we're just as buried. I'm not at all hopeful that spam can be contained at all.
The only real solution is to go after the advertisers, the clients. I get occasional spam from what looks like mainstream advertisers, and if they get interested either in avoiding the bad press of spamming people OR they get interested in spammers using their trademarks without permission, maybe then we get some results.
But there's plenty of advertisers that don't care.
The ultimate solution is to make the spammers pay more than their clients will tolerate.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
i cant give you those answers, but i see a similar trend, spam is dropping since end of August/start of September
check the graph (rejects and spam tags are spam):
http://picpaste.com/spam.png
in the previous years, i would see a big increase of spam since November until Christmas, this is the first time in years that i get less spam in Christmas than the rest of the year... i see now that i'm not the only one
i have a usual level of spam of 60% during the year and its now on a spam ratio of 25% (but this week is usually a slow week for spam every year)
Higuita
Even better, this university gets a lot more spam than i and check the graphs
http://picpaste.com/mx-fx7b1NOG.png
Higuita
Spam to my mail server has increased quite significantly the last three months. The most recent low was about the middle of this year (when my personal email address was "only" getting 600 spam emails per day on average), currently the average is closer to 1200 spam emails per day (About a year ago, it was around 1000 spam mails per day on average). Fortunately SpamAssassin catches pretty much everything.
Some interesting things I've noted from the count of spam:
* It drops markedly over weekends (sometimes by as much as two thirds). Either spammers take the weekends off, or the machines with the botnets installed are typically in businesses and are switched off over the weekend.
* I noted a big drop in spam when that "false positive" story broke with one of the antivirus vendors (I don't remember which one it was) which rendered a large number of Windows machines unbootable - perhaps these machines were infected after all.
* I see a dent in the spam numbers every time there's an announcement about some botnet being taken down. However, the numbers only drop off for perhaps a week or two, after that the spam is back with a vengeance, usually at an even higher rate than before.
* The highest single day amount of spam to my personal email address this year was over 1900 spam messages.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I've noticed very much the opposite at work.
As you can see, there's been a general trend downwards, in jumps, since July-Sept. 2009.
The filters being used here are (1) IP addresses with valid DNS entries, (2) DNS blacklists, (3) ClamAV (with spam signatures added), followed by (4) SpamAssassin, which has been detuned so that it doesn't produce any false positives. Seeing as only a few spams actually get past ClamAV this is merely to catch those which don't have a signature yet.
P.S.: Off topic: Right on commander! ;-)
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Even if they could produce the real stuff, that is far more profitable and less cumbersome to sell sugar pills - or nothing at all.
That is a bit like fake rolex. Rolex-quality level fakes exist, stolen rolex exist, but the half homeless vendor with his blanket at the corner of the street is not the guy where you can get those from.
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.
That's why I like using the "+" separator whenever I can. It allows easy filtering and I know exactly where it was received from.
Unfortunately a lot of web form validation systems don't accept the format "person+foo@domain.com" as valid, and I have to end up removing the "+foo". When I was more active on Usenet I used a date-based format for my posting ("person+unetYYmmDD@domain.com") that I updated semi-regularly. I then created a ".forward+unetYYmmDD" that put things into /dev/null once the address was harvested after a few months.
I believe Gmail supports the +foo modifier, but my company exchange system sadly does not.
Let me guess: You live in Hawaii?
You know, the baseball bat thing is a good idea, but it's missing details: buy the bat with cash, wait a week or two, keep it in a plastic bag, and wear cheap gloves. When you're done, leave the bat and dispose of the gloves later on - use the plastic bag and a public trash can somewhere you don't buy anything. It's the little things that are so important.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"