Studies from McAfee have reported that in August, 72% more domains have been used by spammers to send you their email spam. This rise in the number of domains used means that a spammer will send out his spam mail in bulk to a large number of people at once; then, when the domain in use is picked up by spam filters, he will change it. The spammers are now cycling through domains a lot faster, increasing the chance of them hitting your inbox. You might expect this to be easy enough for big anti-spam companies to counteract, but, when examined, it occurs at an amazing speed: anti-spam companies can pick up on these spam domains within ten to twenty minutes, but the spammer is now cycling through his spam domains even faster than this, in order to get the maximum effect from his spam abuse.
This "Tom and Jerry" game between spammers and anti-spam companies is ongoing - anti-spam companies are always updating their filters to beat the spammer, but spammers are becoming more and more persistent, increasing the number of domains used, and cycling faster and faster through those domains, to make their way past the spam filters.
McAfee's regional director for the Middle East has said that, "If it takes traditional blacklists fifteen to twenty minutes to block a site, then that's how fast the spammers need to change their URLs". With domain registration and hosting becoming so cheap and widely available today, spammers need only spend a couple of hundred pounds for a full days spamming, from which they can make thousands of pounds. The lure for spammers is obvious, and their annoyance for ethical internet users even more so. Due to this, anti-spam companies are being employed more and more to, effectively, make the spammers work harder.
What we need is more than just a temporary solution from big anti-spam companies. What we need is larger penalties, and bigger deterrents to decrease the potential spammers' desire to annoy us every day. Bigmouthmedia reported last week in an article entitled Nine years in prison for spam abuse that a court judgement in Virginia USA was upheld to sentence a spammer to nine years in jail for his crime. Some people have argued that this sentence is a bit extreme, but these are the kind of universal deterrents that we need to stop people moving into the world of spam.
We all hate spam - it's about time the world was rid of it!
