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A Month After Grum Botnet Takedown, Spam Back To Previous Levels
wiredmikey writes "It's been over a month since spam-spewing Grum botnet has been shut down, but spam experts say there hasn't been a noticeable impact on global spam volume. Symantec researchers at the time estimated that Grum was responsible for one-third of all spam being sent worldwide, and its takedown led to an immediate drop in global spam email volumes by as much as 15 to 20 percent. However, the drop was only temporary. While Grum had an estimated hundred thousand zombies sending spam, the machines were likely blocked for sending emails too frequently, or wound up on IP blacklists, said Andrew Conway, Cloudmark researcher. IP filtering is fast and cheap, and is a good first line of defense against spam, Conway said. Grum spam was easy to blacklist, and despite its size, most spam messages from the botnet probably never reached user inboxes."
Spam continues to be an annoyance to anyone without an active probabilistic filter.
Is it not possible they simply have a few botnets sitting around unused ready to be activated should an active botnet go down? While the revenue of having one botnet operating with one in reserve probably wouldn't be as high as having both operating, it would give a greater guarantee of continued revenue.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A company gets shutdown, but the demand for email advertising is still there, so other companies move-in to fill the need of customers. (Same thing happened with megaupload..... shutting it down didn't stop file sharing. It just showed the U.S. government is a lackey/hitman for the Hollywood megacorps. AKA fascist.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
is spam to my craigslist postings. I've clicked the Spam button in Gmail many times, but they still show up. They use Yahoo accounts and quote snippets of your post and randomly generated (but grammatical) text to make it seem like a legitimate message. I've got to figure out a filter that will hit on those.
Filtering can be a good first line defense, yes. However it will never, ever solve the spam epidemic on its own. No amount of filtering ever will.
This is about a group that took a better step, in going after a botnet. That is more effective than filtering in the long term, but still won't do the trick.
The long term solution comes from acknowledging that spam is an economic problem. A lot of reactionary measures (such as filtering) treat spam almost as if it is a game or a personal attack on themselves. Spammers don't give a shit who you are or what your reaction is to spam. Spammers just want to make money. Someone is paying them to send out spam. If you want to stop spam for real, you need to stop the money. If the spammers don't get paid, they don't send out spam.
It's that simple. Everything else just kicks the can down the road.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They just tipped off the crooks. Simply taking them down leaves the criminals at large, and they just learn to spam better.
Microsoft's silly and pointless lawsuits won't work either. How do you sue somebody in a different jurisdiction, with different laws, no buy-in by host government, where you don't know their names? These people are CRIMINALS, and don't give a rat's ass.
The only way to stop this kind of criminality is hard jail time. Getting buggered rotten in the Gulag should help concentrate some minds wonderfully.
Hack the sites selling via spam and publish identifying data for the purchasers.
delete me
I thought that after several decades of spam, people would generally be smart enough to only give their email addresses to friends and family so that it wouldn't get on spammers lists in the first place. That plus using throw-away accounts when you need one for a web forum or something and you can be spam-free. I don't think I have received even one single spam since at least the 1990s. Spam is a 20th-century problem, not a 21st century problem.
ALL SPAMMERS MUST DIE
Literally.. The internet is living blob of goo... with all its viral infections and everything. It's time to dissect it in the biology lab, with all the other frogs.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I only see one publicly visible spam volume graph supporting this claim: SpamHaus CBL (look at the "Last quarter" graph).
SpamCop and SenderBase suggest the overall trend is still down, though I'm not convinced this is related to Grum -- it appears Grum just wasn't as major a player as people thought.
The other graphs I have bookmarked, from McAfee (click the "Historic Data" tab) and Symantec, are inconclusive.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Shut down the spammers at the source go after the money. The companies that are advertised in the spam have real contact information in order for them to fleece customers. This contact information can be used to trace the spammers' clients. Cut out the clients and the spammers have to go into another business.
No one thing is going to take down the spam problem all by itself. But you can't continue to ignore the origin of the flow of money. Cut the money off at the source: the spammers' clients.
Next step is go after the source of the bot nets: the Windows hosts upon which they grow and thrive. Get rid of those, get everyone on Linux, BSD or OS X and the bot nets go away.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I wonder if Romney would be against the idea of microtaxes on bulk emails. Probably. I can see the TV ad now : Romney is Pro-Spam!
Span traffic back to normal one month after take down? Simple, take down two botnets per month.
Why would the takedown of any given botnet cut the levels of spam, beyond a short term blip? What makes anyone think this would happen?
The botnet owners aren't the ones who are sending the spam -- they're selling their services to third parties who are the ones who are actually responsible for the junk.
If you take down a botnet, sure it hurts the owners of that botnet, because they won't get the commission payments any more, but the actual spammers don't care; they just move on to the next available botnet. There may be a short-term dip, as they have to make the effort to find an alternative, but that's as much effect at you're going to have.
Killing the botnets is a good thing, but don't expect it to result in less spam.
Until we start executing spammers, spam will always come back to previous levels. Kill spammers. Seriously. Murderers, rapists, and pedophiles target a relatively small number of victims. Spammers affect the lives of millions of people - PER INSTANCE OF CRIME. Spammers should receive nothing but the death penalty, quickly and efficiently - no messing around.
haha hehe hoho there coming to take my botnet away haha hehe hoho
hahaha
im sorry this planets people in charge are a fraking joke