Posted on 01/11/2007 6:12:57 PM PST by qam1
A new report has revealed that spam mail constituted almost 94 per cent of all emails during December, a record figure.
The study by security firm Postini indicated that spam levels have more than doubled since December 2005, posing a serious threat to businesses.
It said that most spam is being created by botnets and web users can expect figures to continue to increase throughout 2007 as more computers become connected to the internet.
'This continued rise in spam levels is threatening the viability of email for businesses that are not properly protected and is sapping the productivity of hundreds of millions of workers around the world,' commented Daniel Druker, executive vice president of marketing at Postini.
'Just 15 minutes per day dealing with the increased volume of spam can cost companies $3,200 [£1,643] per employee per year, which adds up to tens of billions of dollars of lost productivity around the world.'
IT security company SoftScan reported a mysterious 30 per cent drop in spam levels last week, with possible reasons including the temporary failure of a botnet and a recent earthquake in the Asia region disrupting spammers' access to the internet.
I'm wondering to what degree ISPs can reduce spamming by blocking port 25 by default. Some do, but not all.
That explains it. I normally have about 50-75 per day on my spam blocker, almost all in a language I can't read (Asian). The last few days I've had less than 10.
A 1 cent charge per email for everyone would slow spamers way down.
Hey, wait a minute! Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003! There's no spam any more, is there?
/sarcasm
I get so many emails trying to sell me Viagra type products and I am a WOMAN!
Not in the least. They use malware to hijack computers and send spam. Clueless computer users would be hit with huge bills. ...and the spammers would just laugh some more.
First, this is impossible to do. If ISPs start doing this, they will rapidly lose customers. I can set up a mail server at home on my existing always-on computer for free. Guess what! That circumvents your 1 cent charge.
Second, they wouldn't send spam if it didn't work. Somewhere there are idiots falling for these scams.
Roadrunner is excellent as far as stopping spam. Outlook shows only 1 or two junk e-mails a month. SBC/Yahoo used to let 10+ a day through
From Preacher Paul or Preacher Peter?
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns and the truth. NRA KMA
Interesting.
If you'd ask me, I'd say that between filters, etc my spam is down dramatically from a year or two ago.
I have had SBC/Yahoo for over a year and have been more than impressed with its spam blocker. It is very rare that one will hit my inbox.
I use Postini (quoted in the article) for our corporate spam fiter. They're right about the recent surge. My org has about 800 users and we've seen peak traffic of 60,000 msgs/hour at the filter. No, I'm not kidding.
Only a tiny fraction of that makes it through. But there has absolutely been a huge surge in spam traffic in the last year.
Unfortunately it did not include a death penalty provision
I've had about a dozen spams in 3 years. I hate the lefty home page but, I'll admit, AOL is my server. It came with the 'puter.
Flame away :>)
I use Postini (quoted in the article) for our corporate spam fiter. They're right about the recent surge. My org has about 800 users and we've seen peak traffic of 60,000 msgs/hour at the filter. No, I'm not kidding.
Only a tiny fraction of that makes it through. But there has absolutely been a huge surge in spam traffic in the last year.
Oh, yes. Some of us even remember the Presidential address on the subject at the time. Yes, siree "Mission accomplished!"
Talk about responsibility in government.
Why dost one think business will be running, screaming in their underwear to find some company that belongs to the British Computer Society that can help avoid this "serious threat" for a "serious fee"?
I know longer believe that any email I get is from who it claims to be from, with the exception of friends.
PayPal, my Bank, stores, businesses, etc. Spam has virtually ruined the ability of legitimate businesses to provide email services. It's sad in a way.
#22 should read: "I NO longer..."
Either a senior or a brain-dead moment...:>)
I have AOL also and I got give them credit, the amount of spam reaching my inbox has dramatically decreased in the past couple of years, I maybe get one a day in one of my 5 email addresses and one of them is all over the web.
If your account informations is not updated within the next 12 hours, then will assume this account is fraudulent and will be suspended. We apologize for this inconvenience, but the purpose of this verification is to ensure that your Paypal account has not fraudulently used and to combat fraud.<br> <b>To speed up the process, you are required to verify your Paypal account by following the link below:</b></font></p> <p><font face="Verdana" size="2"> <a href="http://www.ccsoy.com">https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_l ogin-submit</a></font></p > <font face="Verdana" size="2"> <div> We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for cooperation as we review this matter.ccsoy.com hails from El Salvador.
Why anyone responds to this garbage is just beyond me. But they must be making money on somebody or they wouldn't be doing it.
If you do not receive email from outside the USA then just block all ARIN ip's. Your spam will go down by at least 95 percent.
I've seen a big increase in spam also. I am a neophyte when it comes to email and computers so I tried replying with a "Do not bother me again" message. Of course, the emails were refused or "failed" but one message had the ISP of fingerless.net and the other was rider.edu. Fingerless was a weird site. Rider is apparently a school back in New Jersey. Frustrating. I am a middle-aged woman who doesn't need viagra, takes no prescription medications, doesn't gamble or dabble in the stock market. How do they get my identification? One thing that throws me is even incorrect addresses make it to me. Of the eight letters in my address, three were wrong by a long shot but the message still made it. I know there's not much chance of stuffing it to the spammers but, boy, would that be satisfying. ;o)
I am a middle-aged man who does need viagra, but I won't buy it from these spammer clowns.
I once made Green eggs and Spam for my kids. They LOVED it!
Why should I pay for someone else's abuses?
What if .01$ doesn't slow down spam? Will you charge everyone .02$? .03$? Someone else pointed out that spam is profitable, otherwise people wouldn't invest the time and money in getting spam sent.
If your goal is to stop spam by making it unprofitable due to fees involved with sending email, you're going to have to increase the cost to the point where the vast majority of the population will stop using email.
Besides that, I just don't think its logical to punish the average user (who is not sending spam) by forcing them to pay a per usage fee because their neighbor is a spammer.
Sounds too much like the liberals trying to take away everyone's guns because a couple kids shot up a school one morning.
Spam is an arms race. As servers are adapted to combat the offending packets, those sending the email devise ways around the servers, et cetera, so on and so forth. I fear it will always be here - we're just going to have to learn to make effective use of our email filters and keep out Del keys in proper working order.
Good for you. So the question is, who does? I'd like to see a profile of a spam buyer.
And how about products to enlarge parts of anatomy that you don't even have! It's insane!
I get a lot of spam at my work account that is just gibberish or fake destination server rejections from e-mail I supposedly had sent myself, that, as far as I can tell, are spam sent to poll valid addresses, such as "john@companyname.com", "jane@companyname.com", etc, in order to compile address lists, which themselves have monetary value among spammers.
I've several private e-mail addresses and most of them receive no spam at all, because I use them stricly for personal corresponce. My main and oldest address through which I do all my internet purchases and warranty filings gets about 30 a day and close to a 100 on weekends. But Yahoo does a good job sorting them out. My company has some kind of outsourced service that is supposed to filter our e-mails and store spam on their servers for us to check, filter out manually, or ignore, but it doesn't catch squat and I get spam in several foreign languages daily.
You said -- "I've seen a big increase in spam also. I am a neophyte when it comes to email and computers so I tried replying with a "Do not bother me again" message. Of course, the emails were refused or "failed" but one message had the ISP of fingerless.net and the other was rider.edu. Fingerless was a weird site. Rider is apparently a school back in New Jersey. Frustrating."
The first thing that you are taught about spam is to *never answer* -- no matter what. it won't do any good. One reason is what you found out. Most of it has invalid return addresses. For those with correct addresses, the receiver is not the spammer -- so it doesn't matter there either. And for a few instances where it might go to a spammer's account (might still be up for a few days), you have just told him that his spam to you *worked*. He now knows you are *really there* -- because you answered.
So, that's the first thing. If you want to report the spam, report it to the host ISP -- and *not* to the return address. There are programs that will help you find that.
You also said -- "I am a middle-aged woman who doesn't need viagra, takes no prescription medications, doesn't gamble or dabble in the stock market. How do they get my identification?"
The answer to your question as to how they got your e-mail address (I suppose that is what you're asking). Well, have you ever given that e-mail address to *anyone*? If so, they probably got it from them. Oh, but you say, I've only given to my friends, and that's all. Well, one of your friends had his computer hijacked and all the addresses stolen out of his address book and now they're in a spammer's hands.
Or one of your friends put you on their "mailing list" for jokes or letters or whatever. What you didn't know was that he put it "in the open" so that anyone could read your e-mail address.
Or else, perhaps you signed up on a web site for something free or a newsletter, or to be notified about something -- and wherever you did it at, well..., one of those hackers broke into that company's computers and stole all the addresses.
Or maybe, they just did a "dictionary attack" and ran through all the letter combinations in the dictionary and came up with your combination -- and -- you got something from that spammer.
There are thousands of ways that they get your address.
You said -- "One thing that throws me is even incorrect addresses make it to me. Of the eight letters in my address, three were wrong by a long shot but the message still made it."
No..., it *was definitely* addressed to you, but it was not in the "To:" field -- that's all. You looked at the "To:" field and saw some other address. That's fine, it went there, too. But, it also went to you, because you were one of the additional and alternate address that the spammer had down, too (in that spam).
And finally -- "I know there's not much chance of stuffing it to the spammers but, boy, would that be satisfying. ;o)"
Yeah, well, someone found one of those big spammers one time and he took some pictures of his house -- and all of a sudden, he found his phone getting threatening messages (how did the spammer get his phone number???). And also, he worried about the spammer having someone else break into his house or burn his house down -- so he was "laying low" for a while.
No..., you don't want to run into a spammer -- they're usually not very friendly and many times they are threatening and also bring some "muscle" with them and threaten people.
So -- what to do?
Get a good spam blocker program on your computer. I have one. It's for Macintosh, and it's the best I've ever run into. I get about 140 spam message every single day (on one e-mail account that's been active for over 11 years). And this program (it's for the Macintosh, though) -- catches 99.8% of all the spam and filters it into a junk folder. It's rarely ever wrong and saves me an awful lot of time sorting through that stuff.
Another thing to do is use "throw-away" e-mail accounts for signing up for stuff or getting notices (which may be only temporary and not "on-going"). When that temp account starts getting too much spam, throw it away and start with another temp account.
Keep one or two accounts for your personal mail and not for businesses. Tell your friends and family to *not* put you on a "CC:" list in e-mail -- because that gives away your e-mail address to everyone. And then, you might also take an account from a company that does a good job of filtering spam for you.
Good luck on your spam problem solving...
Regards,
Star Traveler
Me too, I have never met anyone personally who would admit buying from a spammer, so who does?
You said -- "I'm wondering to what degree ISPs can reduce spamming by blocking port 25 by default. Some do, but not all."
Just go to port 587 and that will take care of port blocking at 25. A lot of home set ups have that kind of blocking and I get around it by going to port 587. That's a standard set-up.
And I have a couple of WiFi Hotspot Accounts for my laptop. I would not take an account with anyone if they ended up blocking ports. I would say "bye-bye" and see you later. I want open ports for all that I want to do -- if I'm going to pay the bill.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "So the question is, who does? I'd like to see a profile of a spam buyer."
Aaaahh..., "newbie" for one. That's a pretty good profile. Another might be "ignorant". Then we could add, as a last resort -- "stupid".
Regards,
Star Traveler
P.S. -- Well, I've got to go and answer some guy that has ten million dollars to transfer to my account. I just have to run down to Western Union first and do a bit of business...
Didn't you know? Nowadays even women want larger [insert appropriate term for male organ here]. I guess we can thank Hillary for that.
I get quite a lot, and it's increasing. But I have Spam Assassin on my server, so I don't see about 98% of it until I go on the server once a week and delete it.
Interesting thing is that, according to Spam Assassin, I have my setting extremely agressive (2.5) and yet my false positives are very low, maybe 1/2%.
Of course the fact that it doesn't come down to my mail client doesn't mean it isn't clogging up things.
I suppose I should not admit this, but when the crowd beat that Russian spammer to death a while back, my only thought was good, he deserved it.
Green = Valid Messages delivered
Red = Blocked SPAM
Purple = Blocked bad recipient
This for an office with 34 Email boxes 
My first reaction was "that's idiotic!", but that would be mean and not very constructive.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just had a bad day, everybody has one sometimes.
Let's see, some scum bucket willfully does something bad and we all have to start paying an extra fee so they can continue doing bad things?
That sounds, well, not quite communist, but certainly un-American.
Besides, we're all already paying extra for it, in real terms of higher fees the ISPs have to charge us for the wasted bandwidth, and things like the software they have to buy and maintain to combat it.
We're also paying in terms of the time we all waste each day, deleting what gets through the filters, and the pain and suffering of people like my dear ole mom when she's exposed to such filth.
If we're to believe the numbers, the cost is in billions of dollars and millions of people victimized. That's big crime, not petty theft.
I vote for the crime and punishment method.
We catch the bastards, give them a fair trial, then put their nads in a vice and squeeze. And I don't mean figuratively, I mean literally. And put it on TV.
I'm betting the spam would go down to nothing.
All ye in favor say "Aye"
full disclosure: Yes, I hate spammers that much, and I'm one of the people who gets paid, at least in part, to combat spam, yet would gladly find something more constructive to do if we got rid of it. Don't even get me started on what we should do to people who write and unleash viruses. And I don't care if "they're just children".
You can always ask to have the ports unblocked. But, getting back to spam, I think that you're making my point. You or I could get around port blocking, but a n00b, the very type of user who's machine might be a spam spewing zombie, would not be able to.
480 minutes in a workday, 15/480=.03125;
$3200/.03125=$102,400.
Is that the average pay in GB?
I have two e-mails.
The one I use publicly gets about 20 spam a day, but Postini blocks all but 4-5 a week.
The one I set up ONLY for eBay only began to get spam after I had nearly over 50positive feed-backs, once I broke 100 the floodgates opened to the point that I can no longer use that e-mail address at all.
I could add Postini to it, but do not want to have to scan it for the occasional legitimate e-mail.
The entire web is becoming less useful by the day.
Most e-mail is now spam, most searches turn up nothing but ads.
Where it used to be possible to look up information on-line, now virtually all that can be found is links to PAID services, books for sale, and eBay.
In fact eBay and Google have now become a form of spam in their own right.
No matter what you look for, even items BANNED from eBay, several of the results will be links to eBay!
Google is getting to just as bad.
The good thing in this is that I spend less and less time on-line, as it's become too frustrating to attempt to use "the 'Net" for any type of research anymore.
The simple solution is to have a threshold-triggered email tax. Require ISPs to monitor email output for each connection, and every message over 100 for any user in one day costs $1.00 each. That would shut it down quickly.
Thanks all for your information. I am definitely beyond my level of competence here. Your advice will be followed. I have only one email address but I used it this past year to purchase Christmas gifts because physically shopping was unusually difficult for me. I guess I should expect some spam for awhile until they discover I don't bite. (I do growl though.)
Spam is profitable for two reasons:
Someone asked why Congress and the Can-Spam act didn't stop it. The Can-Spam act was largely written by these criminal spammers and their lobby, the "Direct Marketing Association," formerly the "Direct Mail Association" junk-mail lobby.
Basically, no one legitimate advertises by email. No one ever did. But Congress is nothing if not equal-opportunity bribe takers. Criminals, too, can buy legislation, and in this case, they did.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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