Masses of spam today - why?

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bpmbooks
Rattled Rabbit
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Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:29 am

Masses of spam today - why?

Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:37 am

Is it just my imagination or is the spam volume insanely high today? What do your overall / worldwide stats show?
What's going on?

Refresh is set to every five minutes and when I look - another 20 or 30 have dropped in . That's about 3 to 5 times the normal volume. That's not counting the ones caught by filters that are set to auto-delete.

Very glad to have Mailwasher Pro.

I never send an email from Outlook with checking MW first. Been a customer for about 5 years now, longer I think.

Good job you lot!

BPMBooks.
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stan_qaz
Omniscient Kiwi
Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Posts: 8671
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 5:13 am

Re: Masses of spam today - why?

Thu Aug 18, 2011 8:55 am

Nothing special globally, http://www.spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml (a handy link to bookmark)

It might be an issue with your ISPs spam filters or a high-volume spammer could have purchased your name off a list or their bot-net harvested it. I'd put up a ticket with your ISP just in case.

If you want to discourage the spammer a free spamcop.net account and using MW to report is a good thing to do. There are some good discussions on setup and use of spamcop.net in the MW 2011 forums that also apply to v6.
I am not a Firetrust employee just a MW user.
--
First rule of computer consulting: Sell a customer a Linux computer and you'll eat for a day,
sell a customer a Windows computer and you'll eat for a lifetime.
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stan_qaz
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Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Posts: 8671
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Re: Masses of spam today - why?

Thu Aug 18, 2011 12:14 pm

They think spam is up: http://labs.m86security.com/2011/08/mas ... ious-spam/ Looks like they are talking more about infected e-mail than total volume though.

They think total spam is down: https://www.m86security.com/labs/spam_statistics.asp

My spam levels are staying low as I've convinced spammers my domain is full of spamtraps that go to spamcop.net and other reporting services and will mess up their ability to spam others if I get a copy to play with. My poor firewall is getting hammered though, as the botnet zombies get activated they go scanning and I'm seeing groups of port-scans, 10 to 20 ports from different addresses averaging well more than one set of scans per minute.
I am not a Firetrust employee just a MW user.
--
First rule of computer consulting: Sell a customer a Linux computer and you'll eat for a day,
sell a customer a Windows computer and you'll eat for a lifetime.
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rusticdog
Firetrust Monkey
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Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:27 pm

Re: Masses of spam today - why?

Thu Aug 18, 2011 12:26 pm

Nice to hear MW is doing some good :thumbsup

I've not noticed any increase personally either...it could also be something like having your email address added to a new distribution list. Let's hope it dies down again for you soon.
bpmbooks
Rattled Rabbit
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:29 am

Re: Masses of spam today - why?

Fri Aug 19, 2011 2:17 am

Many thanks for all the feedback. I've joined Spamcop as suggested.

cheers, bpmbooks.
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stan_qaz
Omniscient Kiwi
Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Posts: 8671
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 5:13 am

Re: Masses of spam today - why?

Fri Aug 19, 2011 4:13 am

Turns out my mom (now 87) is getting hammered with the virus infested spam messages too. She called when one looked troublesome, it had detected a Windows registry error and wanted to run to correct it. Called me and asked if that really was something she needed to do on her Linux system. :nono

She knew the UPS, bank, lottery and several others were fake.

In any case she is safe since I "forgot" to write down her root password so she would have to call to get it. Easier for me to go over and do weekly maintenance than to have her get confused when logged in as root.
I am not a Firetrust employee just a MW user.
--
First rule of computer consulting: Sell a customer a Linux computer and you'll eat for a day,
sell a customer a Windows computer and you'll eat for a lifetime.

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