Students blamed for September spam surge

 

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Posted on 2 Oct 2007 at 15:46

Students are responsible for record levels of spam in September, according to email security firm Softscan.

Spam levels increased by 39% from August to September, Softscan claims - a trend that is starting to become worryingly regular.

"It seems every year around September, the number goes up. But it goes up and stays up, then the next year at the same time, it goes up again. Somebody should coin a name for it," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan.

"There has to be several reasons, but speculation surrounds students. The number seems to jump up overnight, every year. We think their machines are infected before they get back to their campuses, then they get a high-speed connection and they're spreading lots of spam without realising it. We call them spam zombies."

According to d'Ambra, the total amount of email identified as spam after passing through its servers was a massive 94%, peaking around 98% on certain days. However, the company did note one curious anomaly at the beginning of the month when spam levels dropped to around 88%, but he was at a loss to explain this "sudden day off."

"There's some very large botnets out there, so maybe they're reconfiguring their systems. Our information is always out-of-date. The spammers we talk to were doing this three or four years ago and a lot has changed.

"They have much larger productions queues now," he adds. "They're like regular businesses. They're organised, they know that if they send out a million emails they'll harvest maybe a thousand machines. It's just mathematics, they know most people have spam filters so they just look at those and work out how to get around them."

d'Ambra believes the spam storm will continue in October, with the numbers being sent potentially increasing by 40% as more "spam zombies" are unwittingly plugged into high speed university networks.

Author: Stuart Turton