I occasionally hear things from people about how “spam is on the decline.” This always entertains me because immediately after receiving an email like this, I get a 200 message comment spam attack on my blog and three IM windows pop up in Trillian with random people I don’t know saying “Hi” with a link to what I’m sure is something truly evil.
Yesterday, Postini announced that instant messaging attacks had increased by 500% in May. They are dealing with large enough numbers and a diverse enough sample size for the numbers to be statistically significant. Here are some interesting ones for you.
Instant Messaging
- 138% increase in corporate IM traffic
- 500% increase in IM spam attacks
- Nifty new names for IM attacks such as Browaf, Tilebot, and Khoobe
- Postini processed 25 billion email messages in May (13% increase from April)
- 86% of traffic was spam or contained viruses
- 65% of traffic was rejected at the network layer (e.g. directory harvest or denial of service attacks)
If you like stats, Postini has consolidated ones across their entire system. IM (what I think of as “Spim”) is clearly on the rise.
Spam in the blogosphere has continued to accelerate unabated. Why – oh why – do people think that I want a comment that says something like “I haven't been up to much today. I've just been letting everything happen without me. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. I've just been hanging out doing nothing. I just don't have anything to say right now. More or less nothing happening.” on my blog with an associated link? At least my filters are working on the porn ones now.
COMMENTS (4)
My guess on the seemingly harmless comment spam is that the author hopes that you approve the initial comment thereby authenticating the user for future comments that may contain links, etc. That's all based upon the notion that you need to only approve the first comment from a given user.
�I haven't been up to much today. I've just been letting everything happen without me. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. I've just been hanging out doing nothing. I just don't have anything to say right now. More or less nothing happening.�
Just kidding.
I get more email spam every day... but while it looks like gmail can filter most of it, there're still a lot that can pass the filters
According to my babysitters - whose lifestyle choices I find to be fairly indicative of a changing market...their friends almost never use email except when their teachers send them school work - it's a totally broken app to them. Not that IM or text messaging is spam-free as you rightly point out. Otherwise, sites like MySpace have been the platform of choice until their parents got paranoid about the creepy, online stalkers. So how do they communicate with each other - they pick up the phone! Novel concept.
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