Posted by Christopher Lyons on Mon, Jul 13, 2009
How many of us have seen an increase in the amount of SPAM we have been receiving over the last few weeks? Here is one of the reasons why:
Spammers are churning out an increasing number of garbage as they regain their capacity to send spam through hacked PCs, according to the latest statistics released by Google.
Google releases quarterly statistics from its Postini antispam group. "For the second quarter, spam volumes are up 53 percent over the first quarter of this year", said Adam Swidler, product marketing manager for Google Enterprise.
Compared to the same quarter a year prior, spam volumes are up 6 percent. 6 Percent is a drastic increase because the amount of spam is such a high volume - that 6 percent is significant.
Google filters around 3 billion to 3.5 billion spam messages a day.. Spam volumes have been increasingly erratic as some ISPs notorious for allowing spammers to use their infrastructure have been taken offline by the SPAM police.
Why is it that when there is a substantial increase in SPAM does the powers that be actually take action? Why aren't they doing this now when the volume is not as high - Why isn't the problem ever actually fixed?
Last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission persuaded a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to shut down Pricewert, an ISP that did business under the names 3FN and APS Telecom. The FTC said Pricewert was entwined with child pornographers, hackers and malicious software developers.
As soon as they were "shutdown", Google immediately noticed a 30 percent drop in spam following the shutdown. Pricewert's closure cramped spammers' capacity to send spam through compromised home computers that form botnets.
But in just a month or so, spam volumes have risen, due to spammers' efforts to gain more hacked PCs. Google noticed that June had the highest volume of spam messages containing malicious code designed to make a computer part of a botnet, Swidler said.
On June 18, Google said spammers sent more messages in a two-hour window than they usually do in 12 hours. That shows there's "clearly a lot of botnet firepower out there," Swidler said.
"The bottom line is there's money to be made by the activities that these folks do," Swidler said.
It's always about money....isnt it?