Well, at least I'm not the only one who feels like the spammers are winning. Since I wrote last week about our struggles with link spam here, the evidence has been mounting that spam in general has been increasing at an alarming rate in just the last month. And the cause of all these woes is the growing menace of botnet attacks.
E-mail security vendor Postini reports the amount of spam it intercepted in October was up 59 percent over September and that as of yesterday 91 percent of all e-mail traffic consists of unwanted messages. Last week it was reported that spam blacklist maintainer Total Quality Management Cubed has seen 450 percent more spam in the last two months.
And there's no question where all this additional spam is coming from. "We can see it's coming from the bots," says Daniel Druker, executive vice president of marketing for Postini. "The part of our system that tracks this type of attack are just off the charts over the last six weeks. It's gotten to the point now where in any 24-hour period we'll see a million different IP addresses being used in coordinated attacks, and 50,000 operating at any given instant. We're starting to get emergency calls from large organizations that are finding that they simply can't handle the spam problem on their own anymore."
Of course, if everyone had effective security software on their computers, there wouldn't even be a botnet problem because there'd be no zombies for the bots to control. Since that day isn't likely to dawn anytime soon, though, how do we keep the botnets from making e-mail worthless for us all? One reader pointed to an interesting discussion in this regard by Ed Felton. Part of the problem, he says, is there simply isn't enough discussion about botnets outside the security business. The more people are made aware of the bots are doing to us, the more likely they will defend their computers against being taken over.
So, by all means, let's discuss botnets, because seeing that I'm not alone in suffering from their attacks doesn't make me feel all that much better. What do you think can be done to rescue the Internet from this rapidly growing scourge?
Post your comments about this column on my website, write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com or phone my voice mail at 1 888 875-7916.
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