Tuesday, August 07, 2007

State of spam - August 2007

It has now been two months since the spam king Soloway was arrested in the U.S. For a bit my spam volume went down, but, that was only temporary. Other spammers have picked up the slack and the volume is almost back to 'normal' levels. It goes to show that sutting down the spammers won't work, the government should also be going after the ones purchasing the services... follow the dollars and it may help reduce the spam load!

The big trend now is the phony 'greeting card'. It appears that it now is used to insert the payload of the spammers into your machine. When you get one delete it, don't even open it. Part of the spam I have been getting is these and I don't even open them. One good article about it is in the Washington post (July 21st, you can search for the article at www.washingtonpost.com).

Again I will stress don't open the cards and keep on patching your system, updating your AV software, run a firewall and if something doesn't sound right delete the email without opening it and send the person a short note asking to send it again.

Current stats for my spam:

2007 ---> SPAM = 67.4%, LEGIT = 32.6%

2006 ---> SPAM = 78.0% LEGIT = 22.0%

2005 ---> SPAM = 49.9% LEGIT = 50.1%

TOTAL ---> SPAM = 70.9% LEGIT = 29.1%

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