Google's Research on Spam
By Jason on April 16, 2010 | Spam and email, Google, spam, command-and-control
Despite security researchers effort to make sure that spam disappears from its existence it seems like it is not working at all. According to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini, the volume of unsolicited email in the first quarter was around 6 percent higher than a year earlier.
Security researchers can rejoice over their triumph of winning few battles against spammers, but the war is not over yet. These days, spammers usually contract out the business of sending messages to a botnet operator, who controls a group of malware-infected computers. There are mass of botnets of varying sizes, each typically looking to a different command-and-control server for its instructions.
Last year, the main purpose of the security researches were to identify the ISPs or hosting companies that allowed these command-and-control servers to operate, and shut them down. However, this was not enough. It took less than a month after the shut-down of ISP 3FN for spam sent to the 18 million business users of Google's Postini service to return to its previous level.
After that security researchers started to pay an attention to the botnet command-and-control servers themselves. However, this wasn't successful either.
While Google didn't recommend where security researchers ought to strike next, others have named the target. If hitting rogue hosting companies doesn't help, and beheading the botnets is limited in effect, then the next logical step is for ISPs to target the computers that make up the botnets.
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