Malicious Spam Spikes To 'Epic' Level

Trailrunner7 writes "There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall. The huge spike comes at a time when spam should, in fact, be dropping because of the takedown of the Rustock botnet, the Spamit network and other botnets. 'From the beginning of August, we have observed a huge surge of malicious spam which far exceeds anything we have seen over the past two years, including prior to the SpamIt takedown last October. The majority of the malicious spam comes from the Cutwail botnet, although Festi and Asprox are among the other contributors,' M86 researcher Rodel Mendrez said."

Comments

not according to my graphs

[fifedrum]

my graphs show a steady decline in spam capture rates since October, 2010. we're measuring an average daily rate about 1/2 of this time last year. (millions of mail boxes, dozens of MX servers, decent antispam filtering) We're blocking around %91.2 of mail at the perimeter as opposed to %98.8 last year.

Re:not according to my graphs

[fifedrum]

you are correct, the missing data point is the volume of email considered "not spam".  This line in the graph stayed the same over the range, or within a minor fraction of a percent of the same. it's the spam counts that have dropped since 10/2010. The customer base also represents a large number of domain names, hundreds of thousands of domain names. One of our largest customers has been offering email since 1995, with many accounts in their domain being around for over a decade. I think it's a pretty solid sample of email accounts.

This is what we get...

[damn_registrars]

When our anti-spam activities center on filtering received mail and chasing down the spammers themselves. Eventually someone else comes in and comes up with a different way to send spam so it gets around existing filters, which just starts a new round of whac-a-mole.

Until we do something about the motivating factors behind spam - that is, the economics of spam - we will continue to get nowhere, while wasting more time and money on the problem.