Botnet takedowns curb spam volumes
Spam almost cut in half between August and October
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Spam volumes almost halved in the three months between August and the end of October, according to Symantec.
Symantec’s hosted services unit (formerly MessageLabs) credits a 47 per cent sharp decrease in global spam volumes to action by the authorities against botnets and organised cybercrooks. In October, authorities in the Netherlands took down several servers associated with the Bredolab botnet. The action followed the September closure of spamit.com, a key player in the unlicensed pharmaceuticals spam racket, and arrests in the US, UK and Ukraine of scores of suspected members of a ZeuS phishing Trojan ring.
The net effect of these actions was a reduction of spam volumes to their lowest level since September 2009. Even with this progress almost nine in 10 email messages (86.6 per cent) are junk mail or worse, as explained in Symantec's report here (PDF).
A similar study by Kaspersky Lab, published on Wednesday, also reports a drop in spam volumes in Q3 2010 to around 82.3 per cent. It credits the disabling of control nodes for the Pushdo / Cutwail botnet (blamed for one in 10 junk mail messages worldwide) and the closure of Spamit.com for the decline in spam volumes. The Russian security firm warns. however, that ads touting penis pills are unlikely to shrivel up and die.
“The closure of one partner program — even a major one — will only result in a temporary decrease in the amount of advertisements for Viagra in our inboxes; the spammers aren’t about to abandon such a lucrative business,” said Darya Gudkova, head of content analysis & research at Kaspersky Lab. ®
COMMENTS
Spamming gits...
It seems whenever news like this is posted on the intertubes the spammers take it upon themselves to elevate spam levels temporarily as if to prove a point. Last 18 hours I've seen a six-fold increase in filtered spam. Reminds me of kids crying out for attention, though is better equated to a marketing stunt - demonstrate they're still capable to their clients despite what is reported in the news.
Nah It's messagelabs....
...going by the almighty f**kup this week it's no suprise the spam volumes are down, nothing's f**king working!
Still Yahoo Netherlands / Germany is more intresting than the UK.
Can the banks and HMRC stop spamming and phishing ?
I have asked my ISP, Bank and HMRC to tell me why the following scenario would not work,but I can't get an answer from any of them. HMRC didn't bother to reply. Their help desks don't deal with IT queries and you can't reach the people who do. All the Safe Online people can tell me to do is all the normal checks for spam. I know it ends up in my spam folder but why should it even reach me ? Is it not an offence to e:mail someone who has not given their approval to for it to be sent to them ? How many spammers and phishers are prosecuted. ? Not many I guess.
My suggestion is...
My bank (HSBC) mails me from from their owned ip address. This ip address is passed to my isp, BT. BT checks incoming mail for a sender-id of hsbc.co.uk
If the ip address of this email does not come from the ip address supplied by HSBC then it is trashed or returned to sender. I prefer return to sender so they get the message that they are wasting their time and their mail isn't getting through. Simple ? or not ?
If they don't want to use ip addresses, what about encrypted passwords ?
Will someone explain to me why this would not work. Surely just a few lines of coding, but it needs businesses and isps to talk to each other. ?
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