Spam – gangs and the 1 in 12million
A fascinating few facts on spam – Not the chopped pork variety; the bane of every web user, the unsolicited mail – normally for products to put pay to your male insecurities.
Firstly, over 90% of email is spam. I can vouch for that!
Secondly, a significant proportion of email (>90%) is generated by pc’s infected by spambots as a result of opening/installing infected programs/attachments.
Thirdly, a single gang of spammers are responsible for over 70% of spam. Astounding!
The first 2 can be resolved relatively simply by the client:
1. Use a server for your domain hosting which has got an well set up spam monitor. At least that way spam can have the subject tagged with ***SPAM*** and be filtered to a junk mail folder.
2. Secondly keep your firewall and anti-virus checker upto date. I recommend the excellent AVG v8.0 Professional.
3. Never open an email attachment, and delete all mail that is not expected or on a list of authorised recipients. And even then be cafeful of opening what they forward to you.
The recent closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail.
Two US internet service providers have pulled the plug on the firm McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper.
Ironport, the anti-spam monitor has seen junk mail levels drop by 70% since McColo was taken offline on 11 November. However it appears this will be a temporary repreive and not a cure. Spam levels will come back to normal before Christmas.
“It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny,” said Jason Steer, a spokesman for Ironport.
The Washington Post has been gathering data on McColo for the past four months and passed the information to its internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric.
It is believed that it hosted gangs running botnets – networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals to send malicious software and spam.
Although the ISP’s & tech industry is fighting back it’s still a serious problem.
“All the US internet peering companies are under much more scrutiny. The authorities and the internet community have woken up to the problem,” said Mr Steer.
But while it might make criminals think more carefully about what they do, it will not stop them, he thinks.
A recent study by computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) found that spammers manage to turn a profit despite only getting one response to every 12.5m emails they send.
… so who’s the muppet who clicks on the ad!!
source: BBC News
