Everything old might be new again
In summary, Q2'09 saw continued unpredictability and the resurgence of old-style spam attacks. Are spammers finally running out of original ideas? And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago? And what are spammers looking to accomplish as they unleash these remakes? Only time will tell.
For more information on how Google email security services, powered by Postini, can help your organization provide better spam protection and take a load off your network by halting spam in the cloud, visit www.google.com/postini.
Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google message security and archiving team
I'm impressed with the amount of spam I'm now getting from "legal" sources.
ReplyDeleteThese are corporations with whom I might have some (tenuous) business relationship, and a large amount of political spam (from legitimate groups).
I can filter these out since the domains are not forged, but my filters are growing exponentially.
In theory these groups have removal procedures, but they don't stick. I'm added back in within weeks.
I'd love to see an approach to filtering out this class of spam -- spam with authentic domains. It's easy to imagine ways to develop a user-generated "blacklist" that we could opt into.
Amazing! I unfortunately had three other folks with my same name start signing up for stuff with *my* e-mail account, so now I get spam whereas I never used to. I like to keep them in my Spam folder to see how many I get a month. It was sittting around 2000 for a while. Then a little over a month ago, it surged to 3500+! I was shocked.
ReplyDeleteWhat shocked me more was a few days ago when I was looking at 3600+ spam in my Spam folder at 9am, and then at noon it was at 1900 spams!! I got 1700 spam messages sent o me in a 2-3 hour period! And now I know why!
Thank you, Gmail, for doing such an amazing job of protecting all of us!
Image spam may have something to do with the iPhone's Load Remote Images setting on by default.
ReplyDeleteGreat article. Of course, there is a big economic incentive to spam. I wonder if its possible to flip the coin and provide a similar economic incentive to reduce spam? Perhaps some sort of price on the heads of those that are responsible for the most spam and most time wasted on a global scale?
ReplyDeleteInteresting, there is so much of it
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to see some background info on spam. What isn't entirely clear to me at this point: does Gmail use Postini, or do they have their own anti-spam measures? I'd guess that they use Postini, but the wording of this article makes me doubt that.
ReplyDeleteAlso: "And if so, like Hollywood, are we now starting to see spam "remakes," based on originals of a few years ago?". If that's the case, your jobs should get easier. Sequels and remakes tend to suck. =]
Didn't it occur to you that the rise in image spam might be related to the rise in people sending images via email? i.e. there's more genuine email that looks like spam so it's harder to differentiate.
ReplyDeleteWow! When do you sleep and how do you sleep thinking about this. Keep up the good job! Thanks for the information.
ReplyDeleteAnd still the legitimate marketer remains the only true casualty of this war. Not long before all ISP's or industry deliverability partners will require a "pay per delivery" or cost incurred IP address certification in order to get the requested marketing material in front of the consumer. I wonder if email stamps will sold in booklets or rolls.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work ';it's easy for us to forget how resourcefull they are ,so well done Google from a friend
ReplyDeletei did not know that spam can be send through
ReplyDeleteadvertisement.are any other solution to detect the spam messages?
thank you.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteDo you have the ability to break this down by UK/Europe?
Thank you for your great work. We have no idea how much of a mess our systems would be without your diligence.
ReplyDeleteCan you tell me how to delete 400 messages in my spam box without having to select every page of 50 at a time?
I'd like to see stats on msgs blocked w/o any user action req'd vs. msgs that were manually filtered.
ReplyDeleteAlso it might be interesting to see stats on how many spam msgs are manually filtered before being read, vs. after being read/opened.
"how to delete 400 messages in my spam box without having to select every page of 50 at a time?"
ReplyDeleteErm... You could use the link on top of the spam page that deletes them all at once, perhaps?
As Gene said, I'd too like to see the stats on messages blocked without enduser action.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, great to see the statistics.
Any information on the false positives?
ReplyDelete> "Fortunately, Google's Postini zero-hour heuristics detected this uprise early and kept payload attacks in the cloud and away from users' email networks."
ReplyDeleteAre the heuristics any more intelligent than checking if the attachments are executable?