Recent Sharp Increase in Spam
We are seeing an extremely sharp increase in spam volumes over the last week. On some of our servers the volumes of spam arriving have more than doubled in the last week.
On a typical night, a typical customer machine serving 4background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; or so domains was stopping up to 3,background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; spam emails. On Monday we found this had increased by as much as 5background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; additional spam emails per machine, meaning a small company like our own is holding back as many as 15background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;,background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; spam emails per day.
And that's only the emails we stop!
Our customers are already complaining about the increased amounts of spam getting thru to their mailboxes, and we ourselves are finding that as much as 9background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;% of the email we receive - after filtering through spamhaus checks, using heuristic checkers, rejecting improperly identified sources and refusing to accept connections from any known spam source.
The problem has become so severe due to the amount of badly protected pc's, sitting live on broadband connections, all over the world, just spewing out junk. MessageLabs revealed last week that it had detected a botnet of nearly one million zombie PCs being assembled.
This super-sized botnet uses distributed command and control, according to Wood, which on the surface makes it look like several smaller botnets, when in fact it can operate as a single entity with remarkable resilience.
Maybe it is time we demanded a computer driving test before someone was allowed to buy one. Or perhaps we could ask the broadband providers to take more care of their ports.
And as well as all the junk, we still get large companies - this morning's prime effort was from Britannia hotels - sending out spam to many hundreds of their contacts, by means of bcc's. So every single email they send, contains the whole mailing list. What a way to protect your company contacts!
