CYBERSPACE — You’ve got spam! In fact, chances are good that most of what’s lurking in any given inbox at any given time is spam. Given that nobody seems to like it, how can it be so plentiful?Things got a little more civilized on the cyber frontier last November, when McColo Corporation had its access denied by internet backbone providers due to a nasty habit of massively exporting unsolicited email through its California-based web hosting services.
According to the New York Times, the good times are over, with an average week seeing as much spam during the last of March as there had been the month prior to McColo’s virtual kneecapping.
That’s 94-percent of all email traffic, if Google’s antispam company Postini’s math is right.
Postini estimates that spam dropped by about 70-percent, but is experiencing an uptrend of about 1.2-percent each day. Part of the problem may be that spammers are developing more centralized peer-to-peer spambotnets that don’t need targetable control centers like McColo.
In other words, spammers are learning from their mistakes. In fact, they’re becoming increasingly savvy, now exploring location-based spam that lead hapless link clickers to a trap site disguised as a news source with video footage of a nearby disaster. Naturally, the video is a disaster of its own, packed with payload and ready to launch.
