Spam Wars: Return Of The Spam
With the end of the Christmas and New Year periods, Websense has seen the first notable spike in the number of spam messages processed by our Hosted Email Security services. Could this spike indicate an upturn toward pre-November 2010 spam levels, or alternatively could it be just a blip in the spam universe?
Recently we spoke with several news agencies discussing the decline in spam volumes during the Christmas period and December 2010. You can familiarize yourself with that story by looking at the article here on the BBC.
Today we noticed a spike in activity starting just after midnight on Monday morning UK time. As long as there is profit in spam, global spam senders are not going to go away any time soon.
This spike is evident in the graph below which charts messages processed per second over the last 3 weeks:
Over the last 6 months the sharp decrease over the Christmas period is even more apparent:
The spike in spam today appears to be attributable to medical spam using Russian domains that we have seen used before. This spam has a subject like "<email address> VIAGRA Official <random number>%"
Example subjects in malicious emails we are seeing today come from spam senders known to our service and include subjects such as:
* Your friend invited you to Twitter!
* You have received A Hallmark E-Card!
* You have got a new message on Facebook!
* Shipping update for your Amazon.com order
We will continue to monitor the situation and as usual, Websense customers are protected against the Return Of The Spam using ACE, our Advanced Classification Engine technology.
