[LINK] Spam Patterns

[Adam Todd]

At 10:39 AM 15/04/2007, Roger Clarke wrote:
>Preparing to visit several people in the security area of Cambridge Uni 
>Computer Labs, I visited the Security Group blog for the first 
>time.  (Shame on me!).
>
>The current lead-article, by one of the people I'm going to meet with, 
>Rochard Clayton, is this:
>http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/04/03/there-arent-that-many-serious-spammers-any-more/
>incl.
>" ... the incoming spam is not composed of lots of individual spam gangs, 
>each doing their own thing and thereby generating a fairly steady amount 
>of spam from day to day. Instead, it is clear that very significant 
>volumes of spam is being sent by a very small number of gangs ... ".

Yep.  I agree.  The subject headings and contents are so similar it's not 
really relevant to call them "unique"

The reason the Subject header has a random number generated is to confuse 
spam filters that might use matching.  Ditto for content.

Spam is up this year.  Last year I quarantined an average of 2350 in a 
seven day period.  This year it's 4830 a week.

Last year I only had 5-10 a week slip past.  This year it's between 200 and 
500 a week.

(sigh)

In fact it's so high now, it's almost making email a useless tool for 
me.  I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have my mail server bounce 
a message on some addresses, back to the user telling them to fill in a web 
based form.

(sigh)