Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall | Hacker News Reader

Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall

bbc.co.uk

66 pointsbaha_man36 comments

Maybe 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?

...and tech-savvy people visiting their relatives forced to do some tech support.

It'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/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.

Thanks for showing some actual data.

I 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.

I 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!

Yeah, 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).

Because the resources are now dedicated to SEO?

Can you do SEO more efficiently with a botnet than without one?

Very black hat SEO yes. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a distributed version of xrumer or other link spamming software.

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.

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?)

You 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_...

I'm not advocating SEO Spam. I'm pointing out that we should be able to exploit these exploiters in turn.

> 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.

Why 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.

Yaye for libertarianism! Oh wait, these things are a net-negative for society and those involved. Never mind, argument is null.

a) Not libertarian b) Not justifying SEO spam, but rather pointing out that there's an economic opportunity in disrupting it!

Obvious trolling, but the slave trade and child pornography probably wouldn't be down with most libertarian principles. The core I've seen from most libertarian folks is "Do what you want to yourself, but don't harm other people." Slavery and child pornography are fairly obviously harming others. Heroin is trickier.

Agreed

No, more like 'yay for anarchism!'

how does that account for the sudden fall off?

There doesn't appear to be any evidence of that being the case. Rustock (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) 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.

maybe it was repurposed for Operation Payback?

Perhaps, the Daemon(http://thedaemon.com) has been activated?

Weird, 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.

Perhaps the spam just got better at getting past the filter, and not necessarily more numerous?

I've noticed this too, with spam that doesn't look too different from the usual.

I've only noticed this past the new year. Perhaps some of the "learnt" filtering has an expiry of some sort?

I 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.

Any chance that someone has started to terminate the botnet owners, rather than the botnets themselves?

This would explain the "Became a Gmail Ninja" marketing: www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html

Actually, it happened at least once in Russia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_kill...

Looking 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.

Once enough people have switched to Facebook as their main means of digital communication, the spammers will finally give the rest of us a break.

Is 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.

Could 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.

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