March sees drop in spam volumes
Spam legislation creates a blip in volumes but is unlikely to prove a real countermeasure to the problem, says MessageLabs.
Last month showed a drop both in volumes of spam and in the percentage of email it accounts for, according to MessageLabs' data. These encouraging signs coincide with US ISPs filing suits against large scale spammers under the US CAN-SPAM Act, but the security company doesn't expect this decline to be any more than a blip while the spammers adjust their strategies.
Paul Wood, Principle Information Security Analyst, MessageLabs said: 'Based on the historical perspective, I would expect the spammers to bounce back pretty quickly and early expectations for April are that spam volumes are rising again. More and more of this spam is being dressed-up to appear legitimate, including postal addresses for example, yet there are still huge volumes of the "illegal" spam, which is being sent via open proxies, and using misleading subjects from forged reply addresses.'
This is borne out by further data from the company which shows a drop in January, when the CAN-SPAM Act came in to force, followed by an even greater rise the following month. Wood concurs: 'I recall a similar decline last June when spam had already reached 55 per cent in May, there were lots of legal actions being taken in the US and a number of States were introducing or revising their own legislation to combat spam... However, this downturn didn't last for very long. Some spammers were perhaps discouraged from the threat of legal action, whilst others cleaned-up their act - or at least made sure there was nothing to link them to any potentially illegal activities.'
spam is such a pandemic problem that most of us essentially accept it and use a filtering service. Giving spam the appearance of adhering to legislation by including postal addresses is unlikely to be rumbled when the current thinking is not to reply to it and validate your email address: if you're not going to complain by email, you're even less likely to test the postal address by writing a letter. And with illegal spammers increasingly using networks of infected computers to spread their missives they remain untraceable and therefore impossible to prosecute.
Reproduced from an article published by PC Pro
© PC Pro
The original article can be viewed here:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news_story.php?id=56103
Permalink Bookmark Digg this story
