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%."
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
They can claim that spam is going down all they like but I haven't seen any reduction in my inbox and I have seen a HUGE increase (quick estimate is five-fold) in the spam comments which appear in my Akismet filter for Wordpress.
Seasonal variation (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed that spam & dictionary attack are seasonal. Over Christmas I saw less than 20% of the usual attacks on our servers. I'm guessing this is due to peoples bot-ridden machines not being switched on as much.
What really gets me is the amount of of dating spam that gets sent to an account I use for FreeBSD porting & CPAN. One would think spammers would avoid certain domains as they're only used by techies. Then again, maybe we're so desperate we'll jump at any chance of talking to a bird.
Poor detection (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. At some point this summer FDA started looking into food supplements and actively removing "body builder" supplements which actually were a supplement for that muscle that is not quite muscle tissue and is affected by various sildenafil salts. A lot of SPAM was advertising these semi-legit operations and it is logical for it to reduce in volume as they get closed down.
2. Facebook, LinkedIn and their like have become easier routes than mail with higher success rates.
I would expect SPAM to decrease as a result of both of these even without major operations being taken down.
Re:I have a solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Russia and Nigeria have oil.
But Nigeria's oil industry is already owned by Shell. And they're working with US government to plant agents inside the Nigerian government [guardian.co.uk] so that the cheap oil keeps flowing.
The linked leaked cable doesn't say that. What it does say is that Shell are/were concerned about Russia giving missiles and/or other weaponary to rebels intending to attack Shell helicopters and other installations etc, with a view to Gazprom taking over Shell's oil wells in Nigeria. Shell asked the US Gov. if it knew anything.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm not a spammer in the legal sense, because I'm CAN-SPAM compliant. Most people here would consider me a spammer, because of some mental disorder about curing the world of whatever it is they don't like (in this case marketing). I've made well over 200k this year. Yes, it is down a bit, but that's mainly due to some recent changes in spam filtering, but now those filters have been figured out. Next year will be great again.
I'm in Las Vegas (spam beach west@!#$!!) and recently there was a guy arrested here for sending scam. It's reported he made over $500k this year and it's completly believable. That's something the antis don't understand there's LOTS of money in it and it's because of them. The tighter the filters get the more money we (that people who can get past them) make.
This time of year there's 2 schools of thought. The first school of thought says mailing this time of year isn't worth the reward / risk, because most people are traveling and not in front of their computers. Where the risk is getting your ips hammered by blacklists before the new year. The other school of thought says mail as much as you can so your offers fill up their inbox / junk folders and have more ips than normal in reserve for when you get nailed for the increased volume.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which makes it all the more infuriating the way that Google ignores the deluge of spam sent to Usenet via GoogleGroups accounts. Obviously they could prevent it, or at least not propagate it, using the same methods. Instead their neglect looks like a deliberate policy to make Usenet a garbage heap and drive people to their own forums.