Google: botnet takedowns fail to stem spam tide

Not my experience

Spam in my inbox was down by at least half since the beginning of this year. It shot back up to early 2009 levels this weekend, though.

In any case, even if takedowns only have a temporary effect, I'm still all for them. It's not because crooks are hard to fight that you shouldn't fight them.

Wrong target

Taking down the c&c servers is never going to be a long term solution. The zombies themselves need removing from the network.

I'm usually against getting the government involved in matters like this, but people with zombied machines need protecting, and there are shedloads of them. I think they should introduce legislation to force ISPs to detect and sandbox zombied machines on their networks. This would have a real impact on reducing credit card and identity fraud.

If one major country does it, and it's successful, many others are likely to follow.

Really!!!!!!!!

And it takes Google, what, 4 years to work that out. Basic economics me ol' mateys. Even a UK primary skool child knows that if you nearest shop runs out of sweeties you go to the next one.

Of course not.

As long as there's millions of completely unprotected PCs connected to the internet at any time, there's no problem in building a new botnet, or activting one that has been slowly(and stealthily) building up.

If we want to stop the tide, we need to educate PC owners, and get infected computers off the net!

just imagine, there are people who doesn't see the danger of surfing with an Admin account, and at least one big ISP in America discourages thir customers from setting up a Router/Firewall between their modem and the customer's PC.

And 99% of all home routers run with the default passwods...

We also need to have 'bulletproof hosters' thrown off the net quicker than they are now, as that at least seems to slow the deluge somewhat.

It's a consumer-side problem

Spam will be around as long as there are idiots who respond to it. And while the world will never want for idiots, the numbers of the simply naive or inexperienced are diminishing daily as people generally become more internet savvy. Also spam filters are getting better (I hardly ever see spam in my gmail inbox these days).

So while spam will never go away, I suspect the effort-to-reward ratio is increasing. Even MS is making it harder for computers to be pwned into botnets in the first place.

(I'm optimistic today - it must be spring)

*cough*

The problem with spam is who's actually benefiting from it.

It's a two-card monty since the anti-spam business is big business. If there were no spam or levels that bothered people where would the anti-spam people be?

Theres alot of talk about governments causing war and attacking their own people. It's been documented having been something on the US governments agendas.

When you look at as much spam as I do on a daily basis you quickly realize no real rocket science goes into how these emails are sent. 99.5% of our daily spam is from outside of the US making it exempt from the can-spam act. While the can-spam act was recently declared a failure I think it's only because it only applys to US companies, doesn't it?

Spam could be stopped, but then corporate america would be in an uproar, they need spam.

It's just like the whole sender-verify and defensive network arguments. Opponents of sender-verify say it creates backscatter that could be connecting to the wrong server to begin with. With that point taken what gets contacted when a server bounces an email based on a spam filter? Don't spam filters also create backscatter?

If you go outside the whitehouse and take some shots at the whitehouse missing your target(s) do the capital police ignore you like the anti-defensive network folks would like you to do with your network? Corporate ISP America wants you to get attacked and take it, don't do anything in return that could affect their hosting of spammers and hackers. After all they are too big to regulate what goes on, except of course when it involves P2P, Torrents, Streaming, VOIP, or favoring their peering partners over the competition.

Kudos to google for at least not allowing itself to send garbage. Can't say the same about hotmail and yahoo.

Gmail too big to block?

"too big to block" has been a big talking point on various anti-spam forums.

However a number of business ISP's block gmail et.al and consider this a USP so blocking gmail is something most businesses think worthwhile.

Also, a number of the big ISP/MSP's have laid off thier talented (read expensive) abuse teams and offshored the work to indian "script droids". And spam volumes have gone through the roof but somehow "botnets" get the all the blame...