the recent rise in spam

I thought I'd noticed a recent increase in the amount of stock spam I was getting, stuff that punches right through the spam filters. It turns out, others have noticed it, too. From the article:

Estimates of the magnitude of the increase in junk email vary, but experts agree that an uncommon surge in spam is occurring. On the low side, Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus, has found that average spam volume has increased almost 30 percent for its 35,000 clients in the last two months. Others have seen much more significant jumps: Spam black list maintainer Total Quality Management Cubed has seen a 450 percent increase in spam in two months, and the amount of spam filtered out every week by security software maker Sunbelt Software has more than tripled compared to six months ago.

The article goes on to say the spam's been coming from botnets, groups of compromised computers, which matches what I've seen in my own much less scientific sampling. It sure would be nice if we had secure operating systems, wouldn't it?

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