We’ve all heard of Web 2.0. But, have you heard of Spam 2.0 – which affects all of us who provide e-mail services and was borne just two months ago? At groupSPARK Exchange Hosting, we’ve noticed that our inbound spam has pretty much doubled over the last two months.
According to Postini, they have seen spam rates increase by 73% in the last two months. And in this eWeek article, Barrcuda Networks is seeing a “67 percent increase in overall spam volume.”
What’s causing this sudden spike in spam? According to the article in eWeek, Russian hackers have created a massive peer-to-peer botnet by hijacking the PC’s of tens of thousands of unsuspecting users to send out unprecedented amounts of SPAM. And this group of hackers has upped the ante in the spam battle by embedding images that evade spam “fingerprint” scanners by changing a few pixels every time and also by using backgrounds that make OCR technology useless.
Many of these spam emails promote penny stocks and according to this New York Times article, Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself, the stock prices do actually increase 5% – 6% after a flood of spam, enabling the spammer to make a quick buck. I know it’s hard to believe that people buy Viagara and penny stocks from junk e-mail, but unfortunately it is true.
The profits incent spammers to continue their battle to outfox spam filters, which creates problems and opportunities for us providers who offer e-mail hosting. The problem is dealing with the headaches of higher levels of e-mail overall and investing in better spam detection technology. The opportunity is to upsell customers on “premium” spam filtering technology. I’ve heard from several hosting providers that their customers are demanding better spam filtering to fight spam 2.0, but in some cases are unwilling to pay additional fees for it. I think it’s time that spam filtering ceased to be a commodity and back to being a premium service. After all, isn’t spending $1-2 per user per month worth the time saved by the users? What do you think? Are the spammers winning?
Also, check out this spam statistics page provided by Postini.
