No, not
that Spam
Only a few months after the shutdown of San Jose-based web hosting company McColo, which was reportedly responsible for an estimated 75% of the internet's daily junk, spam is back where it was before the crackdown.
The report from Postini, which provides e-mail security to 15 million users of Google's enterprise services, states spam is growing faster than ever, with spammers diversifying distribution strategies to avoid being blocked.
McColo was notorious among security experts for the sheer number of spammers on its client list, forcing Google Enterprise to intercept up to 100 spam messages a day per Google business e-mail user, and 60 to 70 on an average day. The company's ISPs pulled the plug in November, partly as a result of a crusade by Washington Post computer security blogger Brian Krebs, and those numbers plunged to around 25 a day.
Now they are again into the 60s. Overall spam rose 1.2% a day in the first quarter of 2009 (compared with 1% a day in the first quarter of 2008, a record at the time).
"It's difficult to ascertain exactly how spammers have rebuilt in the wake of McColo, but data suggests they're adopting new strategies to avoid a McColo-type takedown from occurring again," said Amanda Kleha of the Google security and archiving team in the report, adding that spammers are building more robust botnets with less volume - at least for the time being - as they wait it out and avoid exposing a new ISP as target.
The report also noted a spike in virus infected spam messages, with a ninefold jump between February and March. Most popular these days is the so-called "blended threat," an e-mail that sends users to a website that infects their computers via e-cards.
Kleha warned of a new variety of infectious location-based spam. Such spam contains a message with breaking news of a crisis or disaster in the big city nearest to the recipient's home area (based on IP address) and contains a link to a page with a fake news story and an embedded video that downloads a virus.
In December, it was reported that personalized spam, or messages tailored to individuals based on personal information stolen from the web, was on the rise.
