Gadi on the decline of spam
Gadi Evron wrote about the decline of certain types of spam, and the reasons for this.
He told me about those neighbors of his a long time ago, but would never say who they were. I’ve always wondered if they were the same who used the pinapple proxy software, who I mistook for the Bulgarian twins for a long time.
Here’s his article:
Taking down spammers: Successful spam fighting via legalization, regulation and economics
I’ve noticed lately that there’s more spam dealing with subjects we never saw before. Spam is branching out. It’s like Jason D said a long time ago: He’d hate for spam being used to sell cat food. I’m afraid we’re about there now.
December 8th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Actually, I told you who they were, which put them on your radar.
December 8th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Did you? You told me there were some comment spammers that were your neighbors, but I’ve never been sure if it was the same outfit. I just didn’t find any other Israeli spammers, and your comment might have made me go back and look at the material I’d collected on them quite a while before.
December 8th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I did.
:o)
December 12th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
I know what you guys are talking about. I run an AntiSpam Service and have been taking sites and domains off the net constantly. As of today, we have knocked off over 450 domains nad still going. We’ve also taken down a spam ring located in London that was operating off of ISPServer, same location. Since then, our inbound spam has dropped significantly. During the last month, we’ve seen our Bad Behavior logs jump from a few thousand a day to over 20 thousand. Then we tracked that spammer down in London and took them out. Hopefully everyone has been seeing a decline for now. Drop by our site @ www.spacequad.com to let us know how things are going for you.
Michael
December 13th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Hi Michael,
I wish everyone WOULD see a decline now. But that’s not likely. My guestbook (fairly hardened against spam) has seen an increase of spam that’s getting through lately. One spammer has figured out how to get past the hardening. That probably means one piece of software out there is getting through.
My wiki has been almost entirely spam free lately. Why? Simply because I demanded that you be logged in to edit it, and I’d terminated a lot of bogus accounts just prior to that.
My blog might have different spammers than yours, or your forum or your guestbook. Which means spam might be down one place, because you took out a spammer, but up another place, because another spammer figured out how to bypass some hardening.
But I’m really happy you took out a spammer. Exactly how did you take them out? Did you make them quit the biz, or did you just take out their servers (and they’re trying to find others as we speak).
December 13th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
What I’ve been doing is starting to get a favorable repertoire with the major ISP and registrars as of lately. Because of the work I do, we’ve come to an understanding that if I report legitimate complaints, they terminate the accounts of these spammers as soon as I send them notice. Its been really fun to see them online and hammering your system and then suddenly it stops after the ISP or registrar gets notification. Then you never hear from that IP or in that case I had mentioned, block of IPs again. I have been posting our emails that I send as of lately back and forth with the registrars and ISPs in the forums.
I know now that since a few of these source IPs have been shut down that my spam load has dropped. Makes one wonder if the spammers are regrouping, putting us on a do not spam list, or just having a difficult time in finding a new service provider. Who knows, it could be all of the above.
Make an account over here and be surprised
Michael
Spacequad AntiSpam Services
December 24th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Glad to hear others are seeing a slow down as well.
When I tightened up my catch-all accounts to only accept from specific aliases and reject anything else my English spam went to record low numbers, almost non-existent.
Unfortunately, now all I get is Asian spam which I can’t read and there’s not much I can do about that except block part of Asia.