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

[Hatta]

The fact that you are blocking less spam is not necessarily evidence that there is less spam.

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.

Re:not according to my graphs

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who reads this in a robot voice?

Re:not according to my graphs

[ccguy]

Amazing how much of email traffic is spam, mind boggling.

Indeed. I just can't get my boss to stop.

Obvious

[Arancaytar]

Apparently, most of the current spam is aimed at building new botnets. Which is sort of what you'd expect after a lot of botnets are taken down.

Lazy Spammer Grammar

[seven of five]

If these knuckleheads ever learn correct English, we're screwed.

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.

correction in the summary:

[nimbius]

A security company with 11 products designed to solve your spam problem, has made a picture showing a bombastic and ludicrous increase in spam the likes of which you cannot possibly cope with. This spam targets your genitals using african money laundering transfers to smuggle a dirty bomb into your new nike jordans and boochi bags at 80% discount, and free shipping.

It is imperative you believe this un-renound seldom-published security engineer working for a vague corporation that runs its main website on a dated version of microsoft IIS 6.0 with ASP. this company worked hard to ensure its pretty pictures had maximum market placement, and slashdot is no exception.

Re:unless

[EraserMouseMan]

Whindows partitions getting whiped and their machines whork? Suddenly? I can't whait!