increase in spam received?

[ddunlap]

I have, over the past 2 days, received more and more complaints about increased numbers of spam making it through the filters - and I have also noticed an increase on my own account. I have increased the settings on the accounts but still more spam is getting through. Has anyone else been seeing this?

[sheila]

At the Service Desk we are seeing more and more complaints about spam, although most of the recent complaints seem to be for delivery failure notices on accounts where the catch-all email address is enabled.

If this sounds like your situation, you might want to check out some recent discussions...
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=21846
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22025

[hobbes]

I've been seeing a substantial increase as well in the past days/week. Failure notices are at most a handful each day. This morning, I probably deleted ~50 spam messages from my inbox (which doesn't include the messages SA tags as spam which go to a separate box). Previously, I probably had no more than ~5-10 spam in my inbox each morning.

I do notice a good part of the increase being attributable to spam containing an image with the text of the spam followed by random text.

[ddunlap]

I am not seeing so many delivery failure notices, just a couple here and there. It is the usual suspects - stocks, drugs and money. In my own account this morning I had about 53 messages that were not caught by the spam filter - I usually see no more than 10-12.

[Buck]

I'm seeing it across the board on my accounts, and they're almost all 100% image. They show an SA score of 0.0.

The SPAMMERS are getting smarter, it seems.

[frankc]

I noticed a jump in spam after the Outlook spam filter update was pushed last Tuesday. I wonder if someone borked the filter...?

[hobbes]

I noticed a jump in spam after the Outlook spam filter update was pushed last Tuesday. I wonder if someone borked the filter...?
I don't make use of the Outlook filter, so any recent increase would have to be getting through SA and FQ blacklist services.

[Jeff]

I've just noticed a dramatic increase in spam over the last week as well. Went from 5-15 spams per day making it past spamassassin to around 100/day on one mail account.

[kitchin]

I've seen the usual slow ramp up since the last SpamAssassin upgrade, just like last time.

But there are tidings of a storm on the horizon (for the Internet as a whole). Slashdot has had some non-FUD on this recently, methinks.

1. The Illinois SpamHaus case.

2. Losing the battle against resilient botnets.
Is the Botnet Battle Already Lost? (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/002251)

3. Worms inserted at the manufacturing stage (Apple iPod, the Japanese McDonalds Mp3 player).

Organized crime is hard to fight. (Money + chaos; at the risk of being offtopic, I say consider a certain extremely oil-rich country as an example.)

#3 in particular shows the slippage in this battle that no one has the reins on. Who knows how much extortion is going on?

We need to replace a lot of basic protocols ASAP, and to the exclusion of marketing considerations. Calling all Dilberts! No pointy-headed bosses! Not sure about Wally.

Anyway, it's a lot more important than the endless brain cycles that have gone into other aspects of the Internet: html standards, abstract data models, email clients, etc. Just my opinion.

[johnfl68]

I would also have to say that spam seems to be on the increase.

John

[kitchin]

:ytold: Sorry to cast such a gloom, by the way.

[Randall]

Definitely seeing more spam slipping past my layered defenses these past two days. I haven't had time to really look at them to see what's going on, or to compare SA's killrate with other my filters (which are also being outmaneuvered by some or all of this new stuff). That will have to wait till the weekend.

And I was just getting comfortable with a 98-99% killrate on most of my accounts. :hrmm:

Randall

[Andilinks]

I defeated some that were using my contact form address by changing the address and blackholing the old one (this is the sixth address so far).

But like everyone else I'm seeing more these days.

I'm seeing a lot with subject lines like this: "Grand letter. You have to read," "Momentous message. You need to read," "Weighty note. You have to read."

They're all stock touts.