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Spam Volume Spikes After Holiday Respite
Trailrunner7 writes "The amount of spam hitting users' inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack. Researchers say that after the sudden drop-off in spam volumes, things stayed fairly quiet for a time, but now it seems that other spammers have picked up where Rustock and the other spamming operations left off. The volume of spam took a big jump upward in the last 24 hours, according to researchers at Websense. The volume of spam hasn't made it all the way back to the levels of the last few months of 2010, but it seems to be on the way."
I haven't noticed a spike in email spam, but my blog (which gets like 20 hits a day) has been getting a lot of spam comments over the last several days. Probably not a coincidence.
Better known as 318230.
...that teamwork is dead.
I've watched it for years - typically when schools are closed for breaks the spam drops off considerably. Once students return to classrooms it comes back with a vengeance.
The only conclusion I can draw is that schools have labs and servers which are the main hosts for delivering spam. With labs shut down the spam engines are off-line.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I was wondering how many women are out there waiting to see me and good deals on pills to make my nether region bigger, larger and stronger!
ticketswapz.com - Buy, Sell, Trade Sporting Event and Concert Tickets
The spammers were shut-down, and then they came back. Wow. I never could have predicted that. /end sarcasm. Maybe governments should just give-up the idea that they can silence speech, and find some other way to deal with it (filtering). Which is pretty much what we've always done (if I don't want to hear a politician speaking, I just walk away until his voice can't be heard).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
1. Spam Volume Spikes After Holiday Respite
2. The amount of spam hitting users' inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack.
3. Researchers say that after the sudden drop-off in spam volumes, things stayed fairly quiet for a time, but now it seems that other spammers have picked up where Rustock and the other spamming operations left off.
4. The volume of spam took a big jump upward in the last 24 hours, according to researchers at Websense. The volume of spam hasn't made it all the way back to the levels of the last few months of 2010, but it seems to be on the way.
Every now and then, I trawl through my gmail spam folder looking for false positives. These sojourns also serve to give me an idea of the amount of spam and type of spam that's floating around. When a botnet goes down, my spam levels go down to around 2000 and odd. When the botnets are supposedly back, they tend to return to the 5000 level. What I've noticed in the last few months however, is the significant number of invalid spam e-mails - those with no subject and no sender name or sender e-mail address. These are by far the most common type of message in my spam folder at the moment and I was wondering wtf was going on. I know spammers suck. But do they now also suck at spam?
(alphabetically)
SANS Internet Storm Center (I can't get the graph working, ymmv)
SenderBase
SpamCop (a feed to SenderBase)
Symantec
ThreatPost (TFA)
Websense Monthly reports (December not yet available, Websense is TFA's source)
An observation: spammers celebrate holidays too; it's hard to recover from a series of shutdowns while dealing with family affairs. I hope their holidays were joyful and full of lasting distractions...
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Getting about half as much as ever since mid last-year. And I don't know why, but 9/10ths of the spam I get now is in Spanish, much of it from South America.
Anon posts won't show in slashdot - might want to fix that.
BTW : Slashdot sucks.
I hadn't looked at one of the bigger mail setups I manage and was surprised to see it wasn't all fluff.
Spam levels are about 1/6th of this time last year
(The 'rejected' are mostly sqlgrey bounces which kills most the spam. The extra grey on the tips is the spam getting through to the actual scanners which looks about the same).
I made a bet (which I have now lost) that spam volumes would rise to their pre-xmas levels by Jan. 13th. This was in response to the numerous news items that popped up in newspapers such as the Guardian and New York Times back on Jan. 5th or so.
The reason I felt confident in that wager is because in Russia, Orthodox Christmas takes place on January 7th [source].
Looks like our Russian friends just got back a little earlier than expected. This happens every January. You can practically set your watch by it (if you wear a watch.)
-- SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
Work work work.
Sometimes you just need a break, you know?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
After Christmas is usually when I find I need to 'satisfy my woman'.
It also helps if I can afford next Christmas, so I also need to 'recover millions of dollars from the Nigerian government'.
The only conclusion I can draw is that schools have labs and servers which are the main hosts for delivering spam. With labs shut down the spam engines are off-line.
From my experience the computer labs at most colleges are managed fairly well, they don't tend to end up compromised often.
Remember now that most college kids these days live in dorms, and they have their own PCs on the colleges high-speed internet connection in those dorms. It's more likely that when the college kids return to their dorms they boot their (infected) Windows PCs back up and they are again running 24/7. Same kids likely didn't use their PCs much while they were at home for the holidays. It is generally much more difficult for college IT departments to make sure that the students are using halfway decent practices on their personal systems.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anyone who actually expected the volume to stay down either doesn't know whats going on here, or was deliberately trying to fool themselves. Sure every once in a while something will happen that will cause a downward tick in the spam delivery rates. But in the end the rate always comes back up.
We need to ask ourselves why this is - and the answer is fairly simple.
It's the economy, stupid. People aren't sending out spam to piss you off (as much as you might like to think so). They are sending out spam to make money. And as long as there is money to be made by sending out spam, there will continue to be spam. We all know how obscenely little money it costs to send out email - hence the profit margins can be huge even when the payment is rather small.
Hence the only way to stop spam is to go after the motivation - the money. If you can distance the spammers from their money, they will lose the incentive to send spam. As long as that incentive remains, so does the spam. We can dismantle botnets, make more filters, or even dismember spammers themselves. None of that is worth a damn as long as there is money to be made. Even when spammers have been murdered it didn't matter because there is always someone else who wants a cut of the action and is willing to pick up where the last guy left off.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes, there was a holiday period dip, as usual. What is different is the longer term (12 month) view
.205 Billion/day average
http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_spam_volume?displayed=last18months&action=&screen=&order=
June 2010 . . . . . 339 Billion/day average
December 2010 . . 92 Billion/day average
December 2009 .
So comparing December with the 2010 peak, or comparing December year to year, there is a huge decrease in the last quarter on 2010.
The steady decline from September to December is most likely attributable to the exposure of Igor Gusev in the Russian media, Russian police action in seizing his computers, and the immediate shut-down of his GlavMed affiliate program that was funding the spammers and providing the pharmacy fraud and fake watch scams.
Therefore we use the following : http://www.okean.com/thegoods.html
in addition to other spam-filtering practices.
Props to the guy for maintaining this.
The level of spam did fall off a cliff, but what replaced it is the most aggressive posting spam efforts I've seen. And no, this has little to do with American household PC's. It is a very widespread Ukranian controlled botnet based on the range of IP addresses coming from Ukraine.
Of course most everywhere else in the world as well, but from US IP addresses they are mostly server range addresses. (in other words, very little consumer broadband addresses involved and instead proxy addresses, server host companies, etc.)
This is a focused effort, almost all the spam are links to allegedly buy deals too good to be true, etc. I assume the sites download malware and also try to get credit card info to make a purchase.
There are some amazing locations on earth these latest attempts are coming from to get around blocks, even saw a Cuban IP address, Macedonia, and some other locations I haven't got hit with spam registrations from before. This is a very widespread botnet.
rd