Google: Spam levels back at pre-McColo levels
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Just four months after ISPs blocked spammers using the McColo network in November 2008, the average spam volume in March reached the same average weekly volume as before the shutdown, Google's network security team said on the company's blog.
In the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2008, spam growth flattened and then "fell off a cliff" after the McColo takedown.
Google's security team wondered if spammers have now fully recovered after the McColo takedown and rebuilt botnets to be capable of sustaining or even accelerating in the first part of 2009. Overall spam volume growth during Q1 2009 was increasing an average of 1.2 percent per day, Google reported.
"It's difficult to ascertain exactly how spammers have rebuilt in the wake of McColo, but data suggests they're adopting new strategies to avoid a McColo-type takedown from occurring again," the blog post said.
Google said a new trend in spam is location-based attacks, where spammers direct users to click on a link to a page that contains a phony news headline describing a crisis or disaster in a major city nearby. The attack customizes the location for each user by determining the geolocation of the user's source IP and then identifying the nearest major city.
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