Maybe a lot of people bought new PCs for the holiday season, crippling the botnets that used to rely on older (less secure) versions of Windows?
...and tech-savvy people visiting their relatives forced to do some tech support.
Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#12Because the resources are now dedicated to SEO?
how does that account for the sudden fall off?
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#13I wonder if the rise of gmail's (and other) spam filtering has made the practice of email spamming less lucrative and thus less popular among the spamming folks.
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#14Weird, I've started getting more spam in my inbox than ever before. My gmail used to be entirely clean, and now I get a few messages daily that sneak past the filter.
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#15Because the resources are now dedicated to SEO?
What people don't like to admit about spam, is that it created value for somebody. This is why some people clicked on the ads and why others profited. SEO Spam creates value. Unfortunately, it also degrades value for a great many others. There is opportunity here. Google or some other search engine needs to figure out how to capture the value in SEO spam. (Perhaps by finding a way to identify "original pages" like th…
You could use the same logic to justify many crimes. And spam is more than annoying, it wastes time and energy. A lot of energy: 33 Terawatt-hour in 2008 alone, acording to McAffee. See:
http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_...
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#16Because the resources are now dedicated to SEO?
There doesn't appear to be any evidence of that being the case. Rustock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustock_botnet) appears to be responsible for the bulk of the drop in volume, but several others smaller botnets have fallen silent too. There haven't been any reports of it being used for anything other than spam and isolated ddos attacks (http://www.joestewart.org/rustock-ddos.html) in it's 4 year history. It is a bit of a mystery as to what is going on, but my bet would be it'll resume with a new approach or upgrade, rather than a complete re-purposing.
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#17Once enough people have switched to Facebook as their main means of digital communication, the spammers will finally give the rest of us a break.
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#18Maybe a lot of people bought new PCs for the holiday season, crippling the botnets that used to rely on older (less secure) versions of Windows?
It's not as sudden as that.
For reference, I admin a mail server for a small charitable organisation, and our mail graph for the last year looks like this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/mail.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/rejected.png
Where the grey is spam filtered by spamassassin and the red is obviously spam rejected outright due to an invalid recipient or an impossible sender or whatever.
The previous year's trend looked sort of similar - I think 2007 or 2008 was the peak in terms of spam we receive and it's been declining on average since then.
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#19I have noticed an absolutely huge decrease in the amount of spam arriving at my main domain. Right now I'm receiving 15-20 spams a day, which is a tenfold reduction. My domain's hosted by Google, and the decrease has been so noticeable that I have an entry on my to-do list to start hunting through GMail's help and blogs to see if they've implemented something new. It looks like I've found my answer!
Yeah, I noticed the same, not on my own domain but on my gmail account. Since old spam is auto deleted from the spam folder at 60 days age the counter next to the folder is a good proxy of a 60-day moving average. A couple years ago mine was close to 10,000 spams for 60 days, currently it is at 1,444 (which is up from a week or two ago when it was at 1,310).
Re: Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
#20Maybe a lot of people bought new PCs for the holiday season, crippling the botnets that used to rely on older (less secure) versions of Windows?
I guess that contributed plus a spike in people starting to use iPads and smart devices and Macs and Kindles etc and either abandoning or just not having their Windows desktops turned on as much. Botnet agents can't send spam when turned off or offline.