Uri Unplugged

I don’t know about you, but it feels like spam in my inbox is slowly creeping up, even though RADirect implemented an anti spam appliance on our network last year. It used to block over 98% of our spam, but now it feels like spammers are finding ways around it.

Just as I’m about to go to our engineers and ask them to try and tweak our appliance settings to improve its performance, I get an email from our anti spam appliance vendor, PineApp:

Subject: Unprecedented high levels of spam and image spam

Spam Doubles during the course of an hour
Spam reached unprecedented heights during the weekend of Nov. 18-19, more than doubling its usual intensity in a matter of hours. To give you an idea of how big the increase was, the graph below shows baseline traffic in one of the Commtouch Global Detection routers where you can see that in the morning it was at a fairly typical level, and then at 9:00 am, the required bandwidth jumped significantly, doubling within a single hour, and reaching peaks in a multi-wave pattern.

Image spam attacks intensify, grow more sophisticated
Spammers have unveiled new, sophisticated behavior for image spam, making use of text written in wavy lines (to fool OCR mechanisms) with patchwork-colored backgrounds (to fool other types of solutions). We have also identified “ASCII art” spam, with stock ticker symbols written out in numbers arranged as letters. These new techniques are almost impossible for traditional anti-spam technologies to catch. The attacks were unleashed on the Internet during the weekend in massive quantities, raising the spam and bandwidth count significantly. Commtouch anti-spam blocked some of these attacks, and missed some; however, due to the vast number of incidents, an above-average number of false negatives were reported.
The email goes on, but the gist of it is, there is a lot more spam, so even if detection rates are in the high 90s, you’re still going to see more spam in your inbox. On top of that, spammers are getting more sophisticated and anti spam solutions are constantly playing catch-up.

I did a quick search to try and verify this info with one of PineApp’s competitors and found this article in USA Today, citing stats from a variety of sources, including IronPort Systems. They agree that spam is increasing dramatically, and that it’s getting more and more sophisticated.

So the battle between spammers and anti spam solutions is intensifying. I just hope the latter will prevail (imagine what will happen to our world if not!). In parallel, I would like to see more legislation and real retributions against spammers, since it’s clear that we have to solve this problem at its roots.

Have you noticed any recent changes in the amount or type of spam reaching your inbox? What have you been doing to battle it? Post a comment and share your experiences.