Slow Down in E-Mail Spamming
The month of March in recent years has set email volume records, but this March is well off the pace. Last year we saw an average of 153 billion messages per day, while this March averaged only about 100 billion messages per day, as per the report issued by McAfee.
The McColo network was not only the large source of spam in the US, but also trafficked in child pornography and malware. McColo a web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was unplugged. Researchers estimated that spam levels dropped about 60 percent after McColo was closed.
E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent. Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second after the web hosting company was unplugged.
McAfee detected nearly twelve million new IP addresses operating as “zombies,” computers under the control of spammers and others. This is a significant increase over the levels from the last quarter of 2008, with an increase of nearly 50 percent. The third quarter of 2008 also posted a record number of new zombies, but it was exceeded this quarter by one million. And although the spam volume levels have not yet recovered from the McColo shutdown, the activity level of new zombies indicates that the spammers are working hard to regain the infrastructure lost and that volumes will return to previous levels sometime soon.
