Malicious Spam Jumps To 3B Messages Per Day 211
Trailrunner7 writes "Last year saw a monstrous increase in the volume of malicious spam, according to a new report (PDF). In the second half of 2009, the number of spam messages sent per day skyrocketed from 600 million to three billion, according to new research. For some time now, spam has been accounting for 90 or more percent of all email messages. But the volume of spam had been relatively steady in the last couple of years. Now, the emergence of several large-scale botnets, including Zeus and Koobface, has led to an enormous spike in the volume of spam."
Enough about malicious spam (Score:5, Funny)
What about delicious spam?
Re:Users get spammed (Score:5, Funny)
I can't compile what you're trying to say without the ??? and Profit! directives.
Re:Enough about malicious spam (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, did you mean del.icio.us [blogspot.com] spam? No, I didn't think so.
Re:Want to See Spam? (Score:4, Funny)
How Gmail manages to work out what I want and do not want, and gets it right is either very clever or very chilling.
Google has no way to know what you want. Instead, they focus on making you want what they give you.
Seems to work well enough.
Too much thinking in hex. (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one who read this headline and thought, "59 messages a day isn't so bad?"
Re:Enough about malicious spam (Score:4, Funny)
What about delicious spam?
What about it? It's slightly less fictional than unicorn bacon?
Re:I have said this before... (Score:3, Funny)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Spam Spam Spam Wonderful Spam (Score:2, Funny)
- Monty Python
"Have you got anything without spam?"
"Well, there's SPAM, egg, sausage, and SPAM; that's not got much SPAM in it."
Therefore all SPAM should have eggs and sausage in it.
Re:I have said this before... (Score:4, Funny)
I've NEVER seen all four of those checked before on a singular suggestion. SO, I will attempt to propose the PERFECT solution, which will obviously have to take into account all four options .... THIS would definitely solve the problem.
We need to pass a law, that would create an incentive for Private Companies to generate an electric shock device that would automatically send a large electrical shock to anyone OPENING SPAM (legislation to define SPAM as broadly as possible and contain SNOPES and Chain letter provisions). The Winning company's device would be awarded the ONE day's cost of SPAM (to be determined).
This is based on my basic premise .... STUPID should hurt.