News Article

Better the Spammer you know!

In November 2008 McColo Corp from San Jose California were blocked by their own ISP after increasing pressure from US law enforcment and security agencies. McColo were responsible for the sending of more than 75% of the junk email that clogs up the worlds collective mail servers.

Days after McColo's notorious botnet was put out of action, several of the big players in Internet Security noticed a dramatic drop in spam activity. McAfee, Symantec and Fortinet all posted reports on their websites.

Shareholders in internet security companies all breathed a sigh of relief as levels of spam soon reached pre McColo shutdown levels. Quicker than you could blacklist an email with the subject: 'Need Sum Viagra Tonite?' spammers have stepped up activity to fill the void left by McColo.

According to Amanda Kleha, Google security and archiving team, by mid March 2009 Spam levels were back up to the kind of levels that were being recorded before demise of McColo. Kleha goes on to put the findings into context: "Spammers have clearly rallied following the McColo takedown, and overall spam volume growth during Q1 2009 was the strongest it's been since early 2008, increasing an average of 1.2% per day. To put that number into context, the growth rate of spam volume in Q1 2008 was approximately 1% per day - which, at the time, was a record high."

It seems that the spammers have learnt their lessons and are trying to develop resilient and subtle methods of delivery, most tellingly tweaking their botnets to not pumpt out spam at full capacity in the hope of flying under the ISP's radar. Blended attacks (spam email links to malicious website that in turn downloads a virus) are also becoming even more common place.

You may be reading this article and thinking 'I never see any spam, whats all the fuss about' if this is the case then chances are you or your email provider already filters out any junk and spam that tries to reach your inbox.

If spam is a problem for your business or organisation then Powergroup has a remote spam filtering solution that provides business level protection and blocks spam and virus threats before they even reach your network and mail server. Visit www.powergroup.co.uk/security To learn more about Protectamail from Powergroup.

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