Topic: 1 Billion Spammers Served

[sam]

he spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.

"Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. Our billionth message represents approximately 125 trillion spam messages that have been sent since Project Honey Pot started in 2004.

"At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Our goal is not to rehash the same old insights but instead to give a new picture that only looking at five years and a billion data points can produce.

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

[Clive]

What a terrible waste of our time and bandwidth.   

[sam]

yep 

[Rik]

Punishments need to be significant and enforced, maybe extending to people who are careless enough to let their machines get infected.

[Reno]

Punishments need to be significant and enforced, maybe extending to people who are careless enough to let their machines get infected.

That would be 99.8% of the public. Just because you had a lot of time to yourself in your early years doesn't mean everyone else was the same way rik.  

[Rik]

I also had to learn to drive and take a test before I was allowed on the roads unsupervised...

[Reno]

Yes, I imagine hitting someone with your computer would be considered assault with a deadly weapon. Sounds like more bureaucracy to me. License people to use their own computers, IT'S GENIUS. Better not let the politicos here it.  They'll see a brand new opportunity for tax revenue.

[Rik]

So should we all be at the mercy of those who aren't prepared to take the most basic steps to ensure safe use of the 'net?

[Simon]

I'm not sure about making people take tests, as such, but I do agree that there should be some sort of mechanism in place, to prevent machines from going online without adequate, up to date, protection installed.  I really can't see that it would be hard to implement something into the operating system, to that effect.

[Rik]

Or have ISPs secure the connection at their end?

[Simon]

I'd rather manage my own security, but that could be useful for some, I suppose.

[Rik]

That's my view. If people won't help themselves, then take control centrally. It would bug the hell out of me, but there could be an opt out if you proved a level of competence and suitable AV etc software.

[Simon]

It would be complicated, and probably quite expensive for ISPs though, wouldn't it?

[Rik]

Not that badly so. It would just mean routing traffic through an extra server, a bit like spam traps/grey lists.

[thegallery]

I wrote this in an email a while back toto make a point, but it seems fitting here:

You know one thing that is totally ridiculous in society? Locks. Totally pointless. Talk about "Bulls**t". Why do we have them? What are they for? No one looks like a bigger dweeb than the dude with 50 keys on a keychain. And keys just double the burden; carrying them, using them, looking for them, worrying about them...   

Locks don't do anything for us except get in the way. The only thing they actually do is help deter others from doing something to us. If we could just get rid of those 'others' we wouldn't have to have to deal with locks at all. But until then, sad as it is, we're better off using them.