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Spam Surge: Botnets At Work

Spam had been relegated to manageable annoyance for most computer users, particularly business users with a solid IT department behind them. But spam and the more powerful bot nets that drive it look like they'll be a bigger story in the coming year.

InformationWeek has been among those periodically declaring significant progress in the fight against spam. Everyone likes to mock Bill Gates' 2004 prediction that spam would be defeated within two years, but we felt some of the same optimism that year , that even as spam volume exploded less of it was being delivered to in boxes.

Now, the mood appears to have darkened around spam-fighting efforts, and there's renewed worry about spam's effectiveness in doing damage and evading filters. Tom Spring of PC World writes that, where early last year spam fighters were declaring victory over spam, now techniques such as embedded images instead of text are outwitting spam filters. BBC News, citing e-mail filtering firm Postini, says there was a 73% increase in spam volumes for the three months to December, with spam now at an all-time high of 92.6% of all e-mail.

More powerful bot nets also are outwitting anti-spam tools, writes InformationWeek's Gregg Keizer. While the article explores the shortcomings of Can-Spam, the most interesting material comes from the descriptions by Scott Chasin, the chief technology officer of MX Logic, of "queen bots" that reconfigure themselves to stay ahead of antivirus vendors. Chasin predicts the spam fight this year will turn to Internet service providers, with efforts to force them to spot consumers with infected PCs, based on the volume of e-mail they send. It makes sense, though the privacy pitfalls of ISPs monitoring consumer e-mail traffic and taking action based on that are perilous enough to expect many ISPs to resist.

It's looking like fighting bots will be one of the big security stories in the coming year, with spam's resurgence one of the big reasons. While many of us have had periodic bursts of optimism about our ability to control spam, Chasin's words are probably the best bet: "We have a long way to go."

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