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.
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
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