Surge In Spam Threats: Botnets Challenge Email Defenses

Everybody's seen it by now. Spam is up like gangbusters in the last few months. And not just in volume; a lot more of it is getting through filtering mechanisms that had previously been pretty reliable. It's an aggravating and depressing situation. A number of factors have contributed to the situation, and what they all have in common, unfortunately, is that spammers are getting much more sophisticated.

Botnets have gotten so sophisticated that they're almost impossible to shut down. This surge of spam is, perhaps, a show of strength, as well as the botmasters exercising the fruits of their efforts developing an underground network. How big is the surge? Postini, the largest hosted secure e-mail provider out there, handling over 1 billion messages a day, ought to know, and know in real time. The company says spam volume is up 120 percent over the last year, but 59 percent in the last two months. That's in line with numbers I've heard bandied about elsewhere, and it's a huge rate of increase.

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