Spam Fighters Losing Ground

COMPUTERWORLD Security ^ | September 21, 2006 | Jeremy Kirk

[jwparkerjr]

September 21, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- Computer security analysts who fight spam face the same thankless task as goalkeepers: They don't get much credit for the unsolicited e-mail they stop, only demerits for the ones that get through.

But those few messages that wriggle past increasingly sophisticated filters constitute the greatest threats on the Internet.

The messages range from relatively harmless pitches for human growth hormones to ones with malicious code attached that could steal passwords or documents from a machine.

The sheer volume of spam still threatens to bring the Internet to a crisis point. Up to 90% of all e-mail traffic is spam, a figure that has crept upward in recent years. The forecast isn't good, either.

"We see spam just going up to the point where Internet servers start having difficulty," said Steven Linford, chief executive officer of Spamhaus, a London nonprofit organization that generates a list used by technology companies and organizations running e-mail servers to block spam.

"Spam will tend to increase to where it will be 99 percent of all e-mail on the Internet," he said. "At that point, governments will start to take notice."

[jwparkerjr]

I have seen my spam content increase by almost 100% in the last month or so. I figure it's a byproduct of all those adds promising earings of $5,000 a month working just a few hours a day from home.

Where I used to get about 200 e-mails a day I am now gettng well over 400.

[sirchtruth]

Is there a sight anyone can point out
that covers the latest computer upgrades
and technology?

[sirchtruth]

The one that gets me is the "Nigerian" scam.
You wouldn't believe the number of, mostly elderly
people, who fall for this perposterous diddle.

[100-Fold_Return]

"Where I used to get about 200 e-mails a day I am now gettng well over 400."

With ATT Yahoo DSL we get virtually zero spam, maybe five in one year. Guess someone's figgered it out?

[Knitebane]

Spam making into my network has decreased to almost nothing. What's the trick?

Know Your Enemy.

The vast majority of spam comes not from real servers on the Internet, but Windows PCs that have been owned. Since they aren't real mail servers (they just blast spam out to real servers) the trick is to set your mail server to initially reject all mail and tell the originating server to try again later.

My mail server gets a request from a sending host, records the IP address, then boots the email back with a 450 error. Since an owned Windows box doesn't queue mail, it just drops the spam on the floor and I never see it. When a real server gets this, it queues the email and sends it again in about 5 minutes. When my mail server sees that it's a real mail server, it takes the IP, adds it to a "known good" list and accepts the message.

There are some rather broken systems out there that don't behave properly and have to be manually whitelisted, but there are scores of ready-made whitelists of servers that don't work. They are known to be real servers so it doesn't really increase your risk of getting spam.

Using this method my site went from several thousand spam messages a day to less than 5 a week.

[sittnick]

It depends on your needs. At my company, we have a problem filtering out spam without also losing legit e-mail. For instance, we actually DO BUSINESS with Nigeria.

[BallyBill]

I hadn't had a problem lately till about 3 weeks ago. Now the floodgates are open again. I use SpamBayes, but for every 5 legit emails I've been getting 7 pieces filtered right to the junk bin.

[sneakers]

After a year of getting about 80 spam mails a day on my office computer (over 300 over the weekends), all of a sudden, about two months ago - it dropped to approx. 15 a day. In fact, for the first time in ages, one morning, I turned on my computer to find NO spam at all! I don't know what happened. Just glad it's dropped.

[Drammach]

Is there a sight anyone can point out that covers the latest computer upgrades and technology?

Here's something..

http://www.majorgeeks.com/

http://www.webattack.com/main.html

http://www.zdnet.com/?tag=ft

http://www.lockergnome.com/

Hope that helps somewhat..
The first 2 are more the software update sort, while the last 2 are more information and tech talk type..
But you can find a bit of both on any of these sites..
MajorGeeks is my primary source for updating spyware and antivirus, firewall, etc..

[jwparkerjr]

I found this article on spam in the Kim Kommando Show News of the Day. It's a free subscription at http://www.komando.com/newsletters/ and she has a couple of other pretty interesting daily offerings such as the Tip of the Day and her Cool Site of the Day.

Her daily newsletter almost always has at least one link that I find interesting or helpful.

If you get her radio show in your market it's worth listening to when you can.

[TomGuy]

The worst spammer I've found is TRACFONE.

I bought one of their cheap phones last March to try out. Had to register landline, email and Tracfone. Got spam after spam after spam. Got 2 email offers every other day on each--landline, email and Tracfone.

I called and emailed to get off their spam list. I didn't renew the time on the phone, so it ceased in May. In August, I was still getting spam email offers.

I have them blocked.

That's bad when one wants to use a 'utility company' but quits because the company is so irresponsible.

[jwparkerjr]

Ah ha! You're the one. I can tell you exactly what happened! The spam gods decided to send all of your spam to me. That happens every now and then.

Seriously, I would think your e-mail service started using some of the new techniques.

[sneakers]

Oh - and I know this isn't spam, but a virus - my Norton antivirus blocked an e-mail with the "mydoom" virus in it. E-mail was sent from the french department at Rice university in Houston, Texas! I don't even know anybody at Rice university! I live in Pa.!

[Proud_texan]

If you don't mind saying what email server software are you using? Thanks.

[DocRock]

bookmark

[Glenn]

But...But...WE PASSED A SPAM LAW!

[jwparkerjr]

I have an old address that I had to stop using a couple of years ago when I was the target of a spam bomb and someone started sending out several hundred thousand e-mails an hour using my return address. It brought my ISP's servers to a grinding halt. I would turn the old address back on every so often to see if they were still trying to use it. They caught on pretty quick, but I never went back to using the address so if I get email there it's almost always spam. The dead give away is when I have two identical e-mails in a row. I still have the old address forwarded to my new address, in case my late Mom tries to email me using the only address she had. When I see one message to the old address followed immediately by one to the new address I can be sure it's spam.

[Tampa Caver]

We use Spam Bully 3. Do you know how this software looks at and decides an email is SPAM? We have a folder set up in our Outlook and 95% of our spam goes there. The problem I see is that it still gets to us but is sent away from our INBOX to the SPAM folder.

[jwparkerjr]

I honestly can't believe anyone makes enough from it to keep at it. I figure if someone is sufficiently anti-spam to have filters then they won't be interested in anything I'm sending in the way of sales pitch. In fact, for me it's just the opposite. I detest spam and simply refuse to open or read anything, let alone actually buy something, from someone who sends the trash mail.

I think the last thing you want to do is respond by clicking "remove me from your mail list" box! That just tells them the address is real and someone pays attention, which means your address gets moved from the cheapo list to the more expensive list of 'qualified' addresses. And heaven forbid if you ever buy something from one of them.

My late father-in-law was an easy mark for telephone marketers. I was convinced they maintain a list of these poor suckers and sell it to others in the industry. His phone was constantly ringing and he never said no. It took us a year to dispose of all the stuff he had stored in his garage that he had bought over the 40 years he was in that house. It reminded me of the Bloom County series years ago when Opus got hooked on the HSN and bought 10,000 tomato peelers! I miss Bloom County, but that's for another thread!

[beckysueb]

I have been getting spam titled Pepsi vs Coke or Coke vs Pepsi, 1 every hour on the hour, 24 of them a day. I can't get rid of it. Anyone else having this problem?