On 12/09 5:41 PM, Mike Nolan wrote:
> > Does anyone know if spam rates are stable, declining or on the
> > rise? The amount of spam I receive seems to be about the same as
> > it was several years ago. The mix of obscuring techniques seems
> > about the same as well.
>
> I have so many filters on my in-house accounts that I can't tell, but
> on an account I have on a local ISP spam which I very seldom send e-mail
> or post to USENET from the spam is increasing.
On another list I'm on, which is a social/news-discussion list largely
composed of people who have been on the Net a quite a while, the
subject came up, and the consensus is that after a leveling-off
period, spam is definitely on the rise this year. A friend who
operates the small ISP I'm a customer of has done some informal
monitoring and he concurs, and notes that most spam he sees (in the
U.S.) originates from, or passes through, systems outside the U.S.
A conjecture is that this is due to a combination of factors,
including the "offshore" legal status of those servers, the existence
of spam-friendly (due to either greed, or ignorance, or both) ISPs in
countries such as Korea, Indonesia, and India, and the hijacking of
legitimate commercial and academic systems in countries with less
network security sophistication than the US, Canada, EU, and Japan.
I have not logged the amount of spam my lists are the target of, but
since I see the crud in my mailbox when Majordomo's content filters or
non-member-post filter catches it, I'd agree that list-targeted spam
is on the rise over the last year. I have not been a victim of
mailback spoofing yet, using Majordomo's "auth" tokens, but it is
probably a matter of time.
--
Michael C. Berch
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
