Last month the amount of spam that was send across the world increased by a whopping 35%, given that more than 90% of e-mail send is spam this is causing serious trouble for regular users like you and me as well as e-mail providers as this reduces the usability and reliability of the service.
David Mayer, product manager Ironport systems said "From 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28."
This current rate of increase was beyond the expectations of internet analysts.Many are pointing out the new methodologies like the extensive use of images in the spam messages instead of text, surge in botnet (zombies) usage by spammers, the increased number of URLs that are available to spammers and under developed spam filters. Most of the current generation spam filters are not efficient in managing messages that contains images.
David Mayer, product manager Ironport systems said "From 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28."
This current rate of increase was beyond the expectations of internet analysts.Many are pointing out the new methodologies like the extensive use of images in the spam messages instead of text, surge in botnet (zombies) usage by spammers, the increased number of URLs that are available to spammers and under developed spam filters. Most of the current generation spam filters are not efficient in managing messages that contains images.
The profit motive work that the spammers are doing has made spamming to a whole new "professional" level.They are always first in introducing innovative ways to penetrate into users in-boxes.The application of hacking technologies in the junk mail "industry" has increased manifold from last yesr.Thanks to new softwares, from fetching e-mail addresses to fooling spam filters everything can be accomplished with easy to use software.
In mid-November, IronPort witnessed a new, massive spam attack that dropped filter efficiency by more than 10 percentage, letting millions of messages through to in-boxes."It's a reaction gap," says Mayer. "It takes time for vendors to respond and come up with appropriate rules, but with their distributed [botnet] networks, spammers can send a huge attack in a matter of hours. It takes time for anti-spam solutions to catch up with the attack."
The spam volumes of this month is as same as that of November itself, analysts believe that year 2007 will be a tough year ahead for anti spam vendors around the world."There's a realistic probability that volumes will increase," Mayer says. "It's a game of economics; there's a lot of money to be made and [thus] a lot of innovation on their part.
The increased efficiency of todays hardware, high speed internet connectivity, security vulnerabilities in popular consumer software that make hijacking PCs etc are positive factors for spammers.As Mayer says "It's going to be a long battle."
News source: Information Week
And you have a problem with someone making money? Other than you?
Try not using your real (most used) email account on register forms and you'll most likely be ok unless you start cliking yes on every activex prompt the comes your way.
Okay. That was so idiotic I had to reply. From the tone of the post I’m guessing you’re one of those liberal/socialist “government has to take care of everything for me since I can’t take care of myself” types.
First, however much people disagree with him, George W. Bush is not a moron -- if you've ever looked up the definition and his college and standardized test scores you'd know that. Second, and more to the point of this thread, the US government (which includes the FCC) cannot enforce laws on persons or companies outside of the United States. And trying to coordinate enforcement with foreign governments is no piece of cake.
What needs to happen in order to fix the problem of SPAM is a complete rewrite of the SMTP protocol. It is a trusting protocol, developed decades ago, when the Internet was in its infancy and people weren’t inclined to abuse e-mail. It uses very limited, if any, security methods to verify the authenticity of the sender.
The current rise in the number of spams sent throughout the world seems to have something to do with the holidays season. Every business tries to sell and earn more in the holidays, so does the spammers' squad.
Gmail, and other mail servies blocks about 99,999% of the spam I get. So the problem is not huge for me.
Other solution may be changing the way e-mail works.
It seems to be slowly increasing too, but maybe that's related to the trend mentioned in this article.
I never give away my address for random web sites anyway, and of course never in public on forums.
A guess is that they guessed my forename + surname combo as it's using the ordinary forename.surname format. Then they saw it worked (no mail server error sent back) and it spread. Thankfully, Gmail's filters work well enough that I don't use to get much more than 1 spam mail through per day or so.
When it costs less to take collective action than it does to install an appliance.
Doesn't anyone use SPF?Open SPF
for my server if mail fails rdns & spf check, it's flagged as spam and deleted.
If the account doesn't exist the message is deleted and no delivery failure is sent. This has become a requirement because instead of using open relays and proxies, spammers are sending messages by leveraging delivery failure/bounce messages.
Last edited by DigitalDude on 27 Dec 2006 - 21:01
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