Summary of Latest Spam News: Some Good, Some Bad
Quick note, a new article on application security metrics has just been posted at the community site.
Ok, back to spam,spam and more spam. Reading security news is like watching the stock market: some days are good, some are bad and you can't always see the big trends within the day to day news bits. Here are some of the good news/bad news back and forth over the past week or so:
Last week Robert Alan Soloway, a top 10 spammer, was arrested. Not so good for him, not much difference for us but it's good to see nonetheless.
Yesterday the SANS Internet Storm Center reported:
It looks like a pretty big DDoS attack is being carried out against several well known anti-spam groups, including Spamhaus, SURBL and URIBL. The Rules Emporium site that hosts additional (and very useful) rules for SpamAssassin is also not available at this moment – I don’t know if they are under a DDoS attack as well.
The author goes on to say the spammers must be getting desparate if they are attacking instead of spamming.
Symantec's June State of Spam Report (summary, full report) reports a continued steady drop in image spam:
Image spam, which reached a high of 52 percent of overall spam in January, has shown a noticeable decline in most recent months, dropping around 10 percent each month in March and April to just 16 percent in May. One reason for the drop image spam is that spammers are always going to follow the money. The drop in image spam over the last two months tells us they think they can find a more effective way to get their messages into inboxes.
Businesses are willing to pay to get there messages through:
Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable's Road Runner and Verizon will support Goodmail Systems' CertifiedEmail program, which charges companies a quarter of a penny per message to ensure that their e-mails bypass spam filters and reach their destination. Nonprofit organizations are offered an 80 percent discount on that fee.
The Virus Bulletin is reporting on "spam spikes" which lead to DDOS attacks:
The aim of the attack is to cause overloaded anti-spam software running on gateway servers or appliances to shut down and thus allow spam messages to penetrate to end users, but the spikes often cause total denial of service in a similar manner to a traditional DDoS attack. An example spike shows 10,000 spam mails hitting one organisation in an 11-hour period, accounting for over 75% of all mails received in that time.
That's some of the mixed bag of news on the spam front this week.
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