Dec 28 2004
Some thoughts on Spam
I’ve had some questions and a theory about spam running around in my head, so I decided to let them out here. To start with background reading, here are some spam statistics from 2003 and a whitepaper from MessageLabs. There as been a nearly three-fold increase in the amount of email sent (31 million per day in 2003 vs approximately 80 million per day in October 2004) and spam has risen from 40% of all email to over 75%. By further extrapolating my already tenous numbers, I figure that means about 60 million spam messages a day. I know I get my share, how about you?
What started me on this line of thought has been a sharp decline in the number of spam messages I’ve received since Christmas. Is this just a coincidence or is there a real reason for the abatement in spam? I’ve been trying to find the article, but I remember reading that a large amount of all spam comes from compromised home computers with broadband. These systems get infected with various bots, worms and trojans and are used as part of a spam bot-net. Unwittingly, families across the nation are contributing to the spam they curse on a daily basis.
Now for my theory: Along comes Christmas, and those same families buy new computers as their big gift for the year. Hundreds of thousands of old, infected computers around the world are being replaced with new, clean computers. The bot-nets are at least inconvenienced by the loss of the nodes, and it will take them a little longer to find replacements. Hopefully the new computers will have XP with the firewall enabled and some sort of anti-virus installed by default, further limiting the ability of the spammers to find new victims.
On the other hand, it could just be that my personal encounters with spam are just a statistical anomoly and spam continues unabated. But some times I like to be an optimist.