Slashdot Mirror
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'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
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?