Super Spam Campaigns

I see a lot of spam. Most of its picked up by SpamButcher's spam blocker, but some of it isn't. Recently, I've seen a concerning trend in the stuff that makes it through. A large portion of it seems to be from 2 or 3 different campaigns.

There are a few people or organizations out there that have gotten really good at sending large amounts of junk right past the filters. The email seems to follow one of a few different topics. One campaign focuses on various "performance" products for men. The other campaigns seem all to be related to finance.

There is a lot of thought put behind these campaigns. Each email seems to point to a different junk domain name composed of an apparently random sequence of letters. This makes it harder to "blacklist" these domains and have anti-spam software block emails containing reference to them.

The extent of automation that appears to be going in is a bit scary. The junk e-mail is definitely sent automatically. It seems possible that the domains themselves are registered automatically. They hosting and corresponding creation of the websites may also be automated. This may all be getting done courtesy of a worm / malware package distributed via security breaches.

Presumably the money still somehow goes to a central entity. But what would happen if this massive parallel computing effort decided it didn't need humans anymore and decided to take-over military's computer systems? Not a pretty picture.

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