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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."
Wait a second, you have a blog... And its NOT linked in your signature?
Are you even trying? Or why have a blog at all?
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?
(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.
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).
You do have a right not to be harrassed, no matter the media. The government can't stop someone from speaking to someone who wants to hear what they're saying, but it can stop them from speaking to someone who doesn't want to hear what they're saying, if that doesn't also interfere with speaking to people who do want to hear. And it can treat commercial and political speech differently.
Spammers know they're breaking the law by harassing random people with random commercial messages they don't want to get.
The fact that it's hard to silence them is not proof they have a right to do what they're doing. It's only proof that the machinery is inadequately designed to apply the law to them consistently. They should be applying the law to themselves, but they don't, because they're criminals. And they like it that way.
...if I don't want to hear a politician speaking, I just walk away until his voice can't be heard).
Now if only that worked with certain /. users, or am I overlooking the tool that allows that sort of filtering?
*Still* negative function...
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
Even Spam can't be everywhere at once.
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.
I agree. Spam is forever and fighting it by shutting down spammers will accomplish nothing, even on the medium run. The amount of spam is rigidly capped from below by the presence of netizens who will follow ANY instructions on the belief that they are ordering a cheap aphrodisiac. The only way to get rid of spam is to get rid of stupid people, but that won't do, since they are also the foundation of the modern democracy. I kid, I kid :) Seriously though, we will always have our stupid people, and therefore we are stuck with spam. Have individuals filter if they choose to, case closed.
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.
That's simply nonsense.
I get tens of thousands of SPAMs each day (last time I counted) which take significant system resources to deal with the initial filtering of and quite considerable extra time on my part to deal with what is left. Time that I might like to spend, say, with my children, or working on business projects. Real opportunity costs as well as resource costs. And repeated unwanted approaches from people I've asked to leave me alone sure feels like harassment (including big legit companies that should know better).
And I also do lose 'ham' messages as collateral damage with some unpleasant consequences for my business; I am smarting from a case just this last week or so.
So, just because it seems not to be a problem for *you* doesn't mean it isn't a real measurable problem generally.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/