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Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
- mootothemax 16y agoI 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!
- camiller 16y agoYeah, 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).
- tomrod 16y agoBecause the resources are now dedicated to SEO?
- IgorPartola 16y agoCan you do SEO more efficiently with a botnet than without one?
- phpnode 16y agoVery black hat SEO yes. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a distributed version of xrumer or other link spamming software.
- stcredzero 16y agoWhat 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 those on StackOverflow and then act to enforce their terms of service?)
- Panoramix 16y agoYou 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_NA.pdf http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_...
- stcredzero 16y agoI'm not advocating SEO Spam. I'm pointing out that we should be able to exploit these exploiters in turn.
- derleth 16y ago> 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. By this same logic, you can justify the heroin trade, the slave trade, and the child pornography trade.
- stcredzero 16y agoWhy is everyone umping to the conclusion that I'm justifying SEO spam? I'm only saying it creates value. (While destroying some for others.) This means that it can be co-opted.
- tomrod 16y agoYaye for libertarianism! Oh wait, these things are a net-negative for society and those involved. Never mind, argument is null.
- stcredzero 16y agoa) Not libertarian b) Not justifying SEO spam, but rather pointing out that there's an economic opportunity in disrupting it!
- jokermatt999 16y ago
- exit 16y agohow does that account for the sudden fall off?
- tmorgan 16y agoThere doesn't appear to be any evidence of that being the case. Rustock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustock_botnet 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 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.
- flipbrad 16y agomaybe it was repurposed for Operation Payback?
- tomjen3 16y agoAny chance that someone has started to terminate the botnet owners, rather than the botnets themselves?
- asolove 16y agoThis would explain the "Became a Gmail Ninja" marketing: www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html
- mike_esspe 16y agoActually, it happened at least once in Russia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_killed/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_kill...
- vijaykotari 16y agoPerhaps, the Daemon(http://thedaemon.com http://thedaemon.com) has been activated?
- kijinbear 16y agoMaybe 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?
- plaes 16y ago...and tech-savvy people visiting their relatives forced to do some tech support.
- Waywocket 16y agoIt'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/mail.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/mailstats/rejected.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.
- eru 16y agoThanks for showing some actual data.
- mkramlich 16y agoI 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.
- misterbwong 16y agoI 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.
- pmichaud 16y agoWeird, 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.
- eru 16y agoPerhaps the spam just got better at getting past the filter, and not necessarily more numerous?
- DarthShrine 16y agoI've noticed this too, with spam that doesn't look too different from the usual.
- TeHCrAzY 16y agoI've only noticed this past the new year. Perhaps some of the "learnt" filtering has an expiry of some sort?
- ez77 16y agoOnce enough people have switched to Facebook as their main means of digital communication, the spammers will finally give the rest of us a break.
- mkramlich 16y agoCould also be a side effect of government efforts to close any security holes that have been or might be used by Wikileaks. Wouldn't have to be limited to US govt, could be others too. All speculation until more evidence comes to light.
- AlexC04 16y agoIs it a sure sign of the effect hacker news has had on me that my first thought was "ooo... a hole in the market, I wonder if I could write something to fill that niche" Meh - spam email has too many legal headaches. I'm sure you can make money doing it, but I tend to think it's a bit more trouble than it's worth.
- dedward 16y agoLooking at some mailserver spam filtering log.... spam levels have dramatically dropped, but they also dramatically rose before that. At this point what I'm looking at is only slightly lower than things were in early december.