No Spam Decrease, Despite The Big Spam Bust
from the keeps-going-and-going-and-going-and-going dept
Last week, in talking about the "big" spam bust, we focused on the key question: if this busted group was such a big player in the spamworld, would it actually decrease the amount of spam we are seeing? The answer, apparently, is no. Slashdot points us to the news that spam levels remained about the same, even as officials claimed that the spam ring they busted may have represented 30% of the world's spam. There seem to be a few different theories as to why: such as the idea that the botnet these spammers controlled was set to keep on spamming automatically (which could mean a later decrease in spam), as well as the idea that other spammers quickly took control over the botnet (or were given control over it), and the suggestion that other spammers simply cranked up their own spamming operations to fill the void. So, yes, it's great that some big spammers have been arrested, but at what point is an effort made to actually stop the amount of spam that's flowing?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: spam
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
What does this mean?
* This form was used from an unauthorized server! ()
This may be through no fault of your own and is probably not immediately correctable. Please come back and try again later.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: What does this mean?
----
In the 1st sentence, who is "THIS" referring to? When I read the story all the way through, we're missing a reference point.
I didn't want to post this as a comment, but it got me thinking. You and I both hate grammar nazis, and it seems that all too often people want to blast off a comment saying how you need a semi-colon or change case, or re-word a sentence to make a point.
Have you thought about adding "write the author" button or something similar that would enable someone like myself to bounce an email back to the originating author?
As a function of this button, if the post has more than 5 comments, the button should be disabled and not shown to the user.
Why make this a functional requirement?
Well, you want to prioritize grammatical/fact errors, not provide a method for mad companies to find a way to reach you without seeing the DCMA notice, et al.
:-)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: What does this mean?
Can you provide more details? I just tested it and it worked for me, but it could be a variety of issues. Any details you can provide would be helpful in figuring out what caused the problem. In the meantime, I'll alert the tech team to do some testing.
In the 1st sentence, who is "THIS" referring to? When I read the story all the way through, we're missing a reference point.
THIS referred to the folks involved in the spam ring. I've updated it to try to clarify. Sorry for any confusion.
Have you thought about adding "write the author" button or something similar that would enable someone like myself to bounce an email back to the originating author?
Interesting idea, though I already get a ton of email... :) But it's worth thinking about some other options. Thanks for the suggestion.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's disappointing that it doesn't seem to be have been as effective as most people had hoped.
I would tend towards the view that the botnet is automated and someone needs to shut it down first.
But there was one more possibility that you didn't mention:
Spam is the dark side of the economics of infinite goods. No promotion relying on physical promotional material could afford the low sale:copy ratios that spam has. But it costs little to set up, the promotional materials (emails) are infinite and they use the infinite goods to sell the limited physical goods (herbal penis enlargement pills) to enough fools that there is actually money to be made.
Where am I going with this? With low barrier to entry and low operating costs, I think that there are just so many other spammers out there that the claimed 30% (forgive the term) market share seems a touch inflated.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Why bother!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
35,000 bots is insignificant
the storm and kraken botnets have nodes that number in the several hundreds of thousands to millions. i'll bet they lose 50,000 nodes a day and pick up at least that many if not more each day to replace them.
when it comes to spam, we are all out gunned and out numbered by orders of magnitude.
these are networks of compromised computers that are 2-3 times the size of google. think about that for a second.
google is rumored to have between 400,000 and a million servers. losing 35,000 nodes wouldn't hurt google for more than a couple of minutes, so why do you think it would affect spamming in the slightest?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I think the most significant decrease came at the time it was reported that a cluster of scam sites had been ousted from their last ISP, but the number continues to decline each day.
There was another noticeable drop last weekend.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Penis pills
[ link to this | view in chronology ]