Despite an ISP Shutdown, Spam Back to Ultra-High Levels

Once in a while, we’re hear news of something that should affect how much spam we receive, but by now, we’ve learned that that’s never the case. Whether is a huge spam dealer being murdered, or an entire ISP being shut down, spam will usually decrease for a while, but not for too long. According to new reports, although there was a noticeable decline in spam in November, we’re right back to original levels. Sweet.

Just how bad is it? Well, prepare to be depressed. Antispam company Postini calculates that a staggering 94% of e-mails are spam, and I don’t have a hard time agreeing there. For whatever reason, I tend to be a huge victim of spam, and I’ve estimated that between SpamAssassin’s work and what I actually receive, I’d get between 250 – 300 pieces of spam per day. That’s ridiculous. I have little doubt it’s even worse for others.

Aside from the annoyance factor of spam, I can’t help but think just how much money spam actually costs people. It would no doubt be far more than what the spammers actually earn themselves. At Techgage, we have a rather simple e-mail server, but even it deals with near ten-thousand e-mails per day, and according to this logic, 9,400 of them would be spam. That’s a lot of extra (needless) computing power. That’s just us… multiply that by all the e-mail servers in the world. I’m not even sure I’d want to know the answer to that one…

But this year, average spam volumes have increased about 1.2 percent each day. And there is evidence that spammers are now building more decentralized, peer-to-peer spamming botnets that no longer rely on the visible and vulnerable control nodes that they were using at McColo to guide their spam e-mail campaigns. “What the spammers have been using to rebuild is more technically advanced than what got taken out and is itself a more resilient technology,” Mr. Swidler said.