The spam deluge
As bad as the spam problem was, its volume has taken another leap. According to an article at InformationWeek, spam was 94% of all email in December. I don’t know how accurate that number may be but I can attest to the fact that there’s a lot more spam being sent out. I have seen a big increase in junk in my personal mail and in the spam comments sent to this blog. So far, in January around 2000 spam messages have been caught by the spam filter on this blog. That’s twice the total for all of 2006. The increase seems to come from more and more botnets. As the article says:
Legitimate e-mail now constitutes a rounding error when compared with spam, thanks to a standing army of more than a million zombie PCs waging war on in-boxes worldwide on any given day.
The age-old story of the “tragedy of the commons” is happening again. This plus the blindness of so many computer users to the dangers of unsecured systems is hurting us all.
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