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."

Comments

Some charts supporting this

[Khopesh]

(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...