Increased spam due to aggressive botnets
MessageLabs announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for October 2006. In this report, MessageLabs highlights the sudden increase in spam levels as spammers gear up to the holiday season, attributed to a huge rise in recent botnet activities and the latest outbreak of the Warezov virus, responsible for dropping an aggressive spam Trojan.
Read the article HERE.
Read the article HERE.
posted by vanish at 10:52 AM
1 Comments:
I work for an email security software vendor that specializes in defending against the high concurrency loads created by botnet attacks. Botnets are _the_ problem facing the global email system these days.
All of our customers have noticed (read the paper here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/10/12/asynchronous_events.html) an enormous spike in spam volume in the last two months — the cause of which can be debated endlessly.
The botnet issue requires a serious amount of work on the part of ISPs to resolve. Blocking outbound ports on cable and DSL networks is a very challenging proposition for a large service provider, since it involves setting up complex customer support systems to deal with all the “exceptions.” I think that service providers inevitably will have to deal with the fact that they are the source of most abuse — lest they be blackholed by large email receivers at the Autonomous System level.
It’s just a question of how long it will take service providers to do this. I spoke with Time Warner’s anti spam manager recently and he said it’s in the pipe, but will take a “long time.”
Until then, cross your fingers that the botnets don’t become even more sophisticated.
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