The Significant Decline of Spam 263
Orome1 writes "In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the world's pharmacy spam. Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December's daily average was around 30% less than September's. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%."
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the fairly low-effort, fairly low-return nature of spamming, I imagine that it is sort of the botnet equivalent of a "screensaver" mode. More valuable than doing nothing; but priced out of the market once a more serious set of criminals comes along(especially now that there are relatively few fully legal spamming locations. This isn't the old days when the world's spam king was some American prick with multiple T1s running to his house, sending spam quite openly right out of his home jurisdiction...)
Why not go after the companies hiring the spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only email spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment spam hasn't slowed down. I think its because E-mail spam is starting to have such a low return ratio compared to getting spam in front of eyeballs via Facebook or Web forums.
For a spammer, cracking into a Facebook account, posting links up to a malicious website to distribute malware is far more lucrative than just spewing out and hoping the outgoing ISP, the relays, the user's mail server, and the user's MUA doesn't stomp the spam first. A FB account is almost guaranteed to be read, and oftentimes, the link clicked on.
Imperceptible improvement (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of 332 spam messages a day, I'm only seeing 296 messages? Not really groundbreaking for me.
Playing Whack-A-Spammer is a losing proposition. Someone will start up a service at least as big as Spamit, and we're just as buried. I'm not at all hopeful that spam can be contained at all.
The only real solution is to go after the advertisers, the clients. I get occasional spam from what looks like mainstream advertisers, and if they get interested either in avoiding the bad press of spamming people OR they get interested in spammers using their trademarks without permission, maybe then we get some results.
But there's plenty of advertisers that don't care.
The ultimate solution is to make the spammers pay more than their clients will tolerate.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)