Are all the spammers on vacation? Taking sabbaticals? Maybe spamming new territories? This morning I checked the comment section on my blog, prepared to do the usual nuking of spam comments and… Wowie — there wasn’t a single spam message there. Amazing! Even on the first day my blog went live, spammers somehow climbed out of the virgin woodwork and paid me a visit. So what happened? Where have all those link lugs with their tortured syntax and indecipherable English gone?
Actually for months now, my blog spam has been shrinking. I’ve been receiving less and less, sometimes only 5 to 10 spam comments a day.
This spam slowdown appears to be mirroring a gigantic reduction in email spam, thanks to recent takedowns of notorious spam kingpins and botnets. In 2010, a banner year for anti-spam attacks, authorities shut down Spamit.com after its creator Igor Gusey, the world’s number one spammer, went into hiding. Also clobbered were the troublesome botnets of Pushdo, Mega-D and Bredolab. Last year another major spambot, Coreflood, also received a mortal blow along with Rustock, a botnet responsible for sending 40% of all email spam. June 2010 saw the peak of junkmail spam when a blistering 225 billion spam messages blasted across the Internet every day. According to some estimates, the volume decreased an impressive 90% the following year. As of November 2011, Symantec reported that Internet spam levels hovered between a mere 25 and 50 billion messages a day.
According to Microsoft, the top dog in the junk email biz is pharmacy spam, claiming 28% of the market. Next come product ads at 17.2%. The always resourceful and inventive Nigerian scams gobble up 13.2% of the market, leaving 8.9% for financial services, 6.1% for gambling and a meager 3.1 percent for sexual pharma spam. (This last figure doesn’t jibe with my own email spam that appears to be chronically concerned with the sexual shortcomings of males.)
I just checked my blog comments again and — oh yes, thank you — not a single piece of spam has appeared all day. May the dream live on…
Are you too receiving way less spam these days?
Computer related:
- My Mac Undergoes a Stress Test
- No, I won’t Answer ANOTHER Survey
- Apple Stores: Balancing Acts Between the Old and the New
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