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Spam Hits 95% of All Email
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Oct 17, 2007 07:45 AM
from the thats-just-depressing dept.
from the thats-just-depressing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."
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Submission: Spam reaches all-time high of 95% of all email by Anonymous Coward
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Summary only link (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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I dunno....I thought "pump-and-dump" was another word for "pornographic images"....
My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? Where? Man, all I ever get are stupid Viagra spam and "O3M S0FTWARE!" (and variants thereupon).
Humpfh. Everyone gets pr0n spam but me.
Dan Aris
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:My spam is still lame :-P (Score:5, Funny)
Do you recognise the canine? Then yes, that's bad.
Parent
SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Thanks Google, for not letting me obfuscate or otherwise modify my email when posting directly from Gmail!
Luckily the spam filtering is excellent and I've only seen one spam in my in box in months.
Re:SPAM @ 95%?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bizarrely, they should be easy to identify. Most of them are in Russian. Whatever bayesian network they're doing should have figured out by now that I don't read Russian.
The other one is the same template, over and over, all beginning with the same phrase. I have no idea why that one keeps getting through.
I'm sure not complaining; they're clearly filtering out a huge amount of sheer misery.
Parent
call me a cynic, but (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening than it really is?
Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about how bad the problem is.
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Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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That's not an unrealistic number (Score:5, Interesting)
The highest two-week percentage of rejected incoming email that I've seen broke 97% a few months ago. It's normally between 90% and 95%.
It's loads of fun dealing with this crap.
Parent
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The FortiGates are configured to just drop the SPAM, so 100% of SPAM detected by the firewalls never get past the firewalls.
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Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Flirting.
Let us pick some text randomly off a googled link and exercise our imagination.
"First for Emailing - UK's only Emailing Academy
We are offering you two free e-courses value $45 each. One is our new success emailing communication programme and the other is our popular lifestyle coaching programme
SUCCESS EMAILING Communication Tips - series of 4 communication tips modules. Designed to get you connecting and interacting more easily and effectively plus monthly success emailing newsletter with tips, quotes and news..."
When there is a large industry which advertises itself in terms like that instead of the original [flirtzone.com] then perhaps there would be a point to be made that email communications are unusually inefficient. In the meantime, well, sure looks to me like anyone who has ever interacted with the opposite sex should have no problem imagining a form of communication in which 5% efficiency would be a striking -- well nigh unbelievable actually -- increase, and somehow that communication medium has not died out in several millions of years.
*looks around* Ah
Parent
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Well, let's assume I am, shall we?
In that case, explain the existence of the site I faux-quoted and its ilk.
Methinks that if I was indeed kidding, there would not exist the market which this class of business caters to. (Or, for that matter, the porn/prostitution/yadayadayada classes of business.) However, since they do exist, we can deduce that the market that they are addressing does indeed exist, and it would appear to further be a re
OK, another data point (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:call me a cynic, but (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
doubtful (Score:2, Interesting)
Did they track private networks? Encrypted Email?
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Mine is full of spam... (Score:3, Funny)
Most of the subjects are as follows:(filtered for privacy)
Courses next term
[Course name here] Grades
IMPORTANT: Calculus Final Exam Time
Hello from [Relative name here]
[Subscribe newsletter here]
Funny pictures
Why wont it stop?
Those were my organization's summer levels (Score:2)
Not new. (Score:2, Informative)
And Security Focus has a great article [securityfocus.com] that shows how all of these numbers are totally made up.
penalize the seller not the messenger (Score:2, Insightful)
The entity initiating the process is identifiable ( the contact information must be accurate in order to effect the sale ) unlike the spammer that can utilize many techniques to avoid identification.
Any different? (Score:3, Insightful)
And we have seen the huge (cough) progress made in removing that snail mail spam from the system.
Honestly, there seems to have been more progress in weeding out the digital spam then the paper sort.
Even vague sort of laws and protections and such.
Been there for years (Score:2)
So where's the invisible hand? (Score:3, Interesting)
We've seen some "free market" solutions which basically required that you pay a fee to every mail provider so they don't trash your email. And this didn't particularly help spam either.
I come to the conclusion that spam as an issue is one of two things, or both of those things:
1) Not that big of a problem (hard to believe if you are a mail provider / ISP yourself)
2) Impossible to solve by means of free market solutions, and requires cooperation and standardization of new technology.
Point 2 is hard to happen since every little startup that comes with a mini solution, trumpet it on their own and hence they are only a nuissance to deal with in the big picture (due to lack of a single standard, it's impossible to have clients which make the process of whitelisting easier and even half automatic).
Here are couple of solution which would get us half-there, but are only quarter-implemented right now:
1) Whitelist SMTP servers by talking back to the supposed mail of origin and comparing IP-s. The SMTP may return list of IP-s this host responds from. This is then cached and used for further authentication on this domain. It *may* lead to DoS if many hosts do a first-time check simultaneously, but it's unlikely (and less problematic, given we're eliminating 95% of bad emails this way).
2) Test-for-human-intelligence in your first email to a new email. Such as, I don't know, some sort of CAPTCHA you fill-in? Once this is done, communication can proceed without further tests between those two emails. The receiver still has the option to block you, lest you employ a mechanical turk.
Those solutions are boring, they're incomplete in a way, they introduce hassle, but if we *all* agree on those, they can be made less of a hassle, and still not lose their efficacy.
That would require the likes of AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and so on free mail providers to cooperate with the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Linux devs and so on, to implement this on both the clients and servers.
Right now, I could see Hotmail cooperating with Microsoft (.. wink, wink..
Why we can't stop spam with our current techniques (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators that are allowing the spamvertised domains to be established and hosted. If you can either prevent them from getting a cut off the action, or punish them severely for taking their cut, then you can stop spam.
Until then, if all we do is try to filter spam out, we'll just continue to see the costs of inaction. Beyond that, we're ignoring the fact that filtering has real costs, as well. Filtering doesn't prevent the spam from traversing the internet, and furthermore it requires human time to update as the spammers change their tactics.
Re:Why we can't stop spam with our current techniq (Score:3, Insightful)
We can't stop it because we aren't addressing the real problem. Spam is an economic problem. People send out spam because they make money off of it. And they will therefore continue to send out spam as long as they make money off of it.
If you want to stop spam, you have to remove the economic incentive. To do that, you need to cut off the co-conspirators
You're right, but for the wrong (IMO) reason. Spam has economic incentive because all the costs of email are borne by the recipient. Botnets have made it even cheaper. You must remove that if you want to really fix the problem.
If you do not remove the economic incentive, nothing will work because it will just be an arms race and the "good guys" will necessarily always be on the defensive side.
Email is dead, long live Email (Score:5, Interesting)
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It will never work. Considering the trash in my brain, I must conclude that it has already been done, and it has already been compromised.
Only a few more percentage points to go... (Score:3, Interesting)
Greylisting to the rescue! (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to bring up anecdotal evidence, but, while I still get spam, my flood has gone down to a relative trickle simply by plugging postgrey into postfix. I could probably reduce it to zero with a bayesian filter, but I won't bother. Scanning through my logs, my server rejects literally thousands of spams every day, and I'm just one guy with two email addresses and a handful of aliases.
So, it would come as no surprise to me that spam volume is that high, I just never see it. I almost want to turn off my filter for a day just to see what would happen.
Well, maybe not.
Re:Greylisting to the rescue! (or not) (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, greylisting is putting an email transaction on hold to see if the sender will retry. The idea is that if the sender is illigitimate, they won't bother resending. However, spammers have been onto this method for as long as it's existed, much moreso lately. All they have to do is take greylisted hosts and move them to the end of their script for later processing. The second time around, the spam gets through anyway. Even with its meager benefits, most organizations want email to come through as quickly as possible, and greylisting delays email by its very nature. It's also much less effective than existing technology that won't hinder most legitimate mail like DNSBL and/or SPF, spamwords+OCR (for image spam), and blocking on unknown recipients.
To summate, if greylisting makes you happy, then don't let me dissuade you from using it. it does indeed stop some spam. But please don't give the false impression that it's a magic bullet; most of the complaints we receive are from clients who've enabled greylisting and can't figure out why their mail is delayed.
[1] I am also a consultant to another firm who hosts manged email with spam filtering. Due to the complaints above, we have also disabled greylisting there. It was only effective at stopping about 5% of spam reliably, but a delay is put on all mail that isn't otherwise whitelisted. There are plenty of other methods which are both more effective and don't slow down the mailflow or tie up much resources on the MTA.
Parent
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Also, postgrey, like most greylist p
Re:white lists are the way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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I can't even the use apparently moderately effective "blacklist Chinese and Russian IPs" technique. We correspond all over the world.
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ISPs should also be blocking outbound port 25 traffic from dynamic addresses (and if you need to use an external mail relay, use a tunnel or port 587.) Some ISPs do
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People's phones don't get hacked to start calling random numbers with automated voice messages threatening to cut off your balls. Also, you can easily trace phone calls through phone company records or even caller ID most of the time, where emails are MUCH harder to trace.