Recent Spam Burst Confirmed

Like many users, I've noticed an up tick in the amount of spam mail starting in early November 2005. My main email account seemed to spike from about 250 junk messages each day, up closer to 400.

Two email security firms - CipherTrust and MX Logic have confirmed the increase in spam with more formalized monitoring. Much of the spam appears holiday related. In addition, a large portion of it seems to be from a specific campaign promoting certain prescription drugs. SpamButcher is working to update its anti-spam filter to reliably catch these messages.

Another portion of the unwanted email has been generated by the "Sober" worm. The worm infects a system via an attachment to a piece of email. After that, the effected computer will blast out messages to countless other systems in order to spread the worm. This email doesn't meet the normal spam definition of unsolicited commercial email - but clogs inboxes just the same. There has been some speculation that one variant of "Sober" contains a, "payload" in the form of a denial-of-service attack set to go off early next year.

Research also indicates zombie systems continue to spread. Some of these computers are effectively free-standing - waiting for someone to come along and exploit them. Other systems belong to larger scale networks, called botnets. Some controllers of these networks have actually commercialized them; selling their services to spammers. This activity is clearly illegal, but the profit incentive trumps laws that aren't enforced.

The problem of spam zombies is similar to the historical issue of open SMTP relays. Open SMTP relays are incoming mail servers that can readily be used by spammers to send spam. A properly secured email server will only deliver email messages to the domain it's intended to receive mail for. The problem subsided when blacklists blocking messages from open relays came into common use by server-side tools to kill spam.

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