"Wholesale" Change in Spam Profile

[rooster]

The profile of the spam I’ve received since June shows an abrupt and somewhat remarkable change that occurred sometime on October 31 (PST), or November 1 (EET).

The recent surge in spam has me wasting time like a lot of other people, looking into this stuff with the vain notion that just maybe some clue might appear to how to make it stop. I presume most of those who review the SC Forum have followed the links and read the articles revealing how the stuff is being distributed, how sophisticated the operations have become, and where the termite queens seem to have their mounds.

It seems apparent that the matrices of bot nets being exploited are complex and every victim will have their own unique profile of spammers who have ‘opted in’ to their email addresses and are reluctant to ‘unsubscribe’ themselves. One piece I read estimated the number of hijacked PCs to be about 4.7 million. I don’t think the smartest systems analyst in the world could estimate how many spam delivery systems, or nets, could be fashioned out of that many possible nodes.

As of about 2 PM on Oct 31, I had been getting about 114 to 198 spams a day for some time. The overwhelming majority of these emanated from “WholesaleBandwidth†et. al. clients (thanks to Scott Richter) and a sizeable chunk of the balance from the Guildford Communications bunch. There was always a smattering of others that came and went from week-to-week that I would estimate around 15 % of the total. At that precise time, the spew from Richter’s Raiders ceased abruptly, and the numbers for Guildford dropped by about 75% … a mere trickle compared to before. This situation has remained the case right up to midnite last nite.

Sometime later in the afternoon of Oct. 31, the stock scam/spam began to be ‘Pumped’ out and “Dumped†in my inbox. The numbers I am seeing are not as savage as many people seem to be reporting. My total spam for Nov. 13-19 was a trifling 320 (about 46 a day) and that is for 3 email accounts. 235 of these, 73.4%, were stock spam. For the week of Oct. 16-22, my total had been 1114, or 159 per day averaged out over the week for the same 3 accounts.

I appreciate that the spam profile for one lonesome Home PC is unlikely reveal a whole lot about the global spam situation. But I would be interested to hear if others have noticed a similar phenomenon. IF so, then perhaps the “Cyrills†herding and infection techniques are effectively cornering the market on the retail spam industry worldwide and the Scott Richters and the Yankee spam Kings (SKANKS) are finding their zombie nets no longer responsive to their wiles. Put another way, it could be the SKANKS are having their ‘little dogies’ systematically rustled, overbranded and put out on the Circle “C†ranch.

IF so, we might be witnessing a range war; eh?