Botnet takedowns curb spam volumes

Spam volumes almost halved in the three months between August and the end of October, according to Symantec. Symantec’s hosted services unit (formerly MessageLabs) credits a 47 per cent sharp decrease in global spam volumes to action by the authorities against botnets and organised cybercrooks. In October, authorities in the …

[Anonymous Coward]

With good news like this

How I am supposed to argue that money is spent on our anti-spam setup?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah It's messagelabs....

...going by the almighty f**kup this week it's no suprise the spam volumes are down, nothing's f**king working!

Still Yahoo Netherlands / Germany is more intresting than the UK.

[g e]

ummmm

But I got 4x the spam I used to have in the googlemail 30-day spam box.... 123k spams instead of the usual 40k

[Tzael]

Spamming gits...

It seems whenever news like this is posted on the intertubes the spammers take it upon themselves to elevate spam levels temporarily as if to prove a point. Last 18 hours I've seen a six-fold increase in filtered spam. Reminds me of kids crying out for attention, though is better equated to a marketing stunt - demonstrate they're still capable to their clients despite what is reported in the news.

[Alan Brown]

Spam ATTEMPTS might have decreased

And judging by my mailserver logs they certainly have.

What's getting past the filters hasn't changed much though. If anything it's up slightly.

[DCSP8]

Can the banks and HMRC stop spamming and phishing ?

I have asked my ISP, Bank and HMRC to tell me why the following scenario would not work,but I can't get an answer from any of them. HMRC didn't bother to reply. Their help desks don't deal with IT queries and you can't reach the people who do. All the Safe Online people can tell me to do is all the normal checks for spam. I know it ends up in my spam folder but why should it even reach me ? Is it not an offence to e:mail someone who has not given their approval to for it to be sent to them ? How many spammers and phishers are prosecuted. ? Not many I guess.

My suggestion is...

My bank (HSBC) mails me from from their owned ip address. This ip address is passed to my isp, BT. BT checks incoming mail for a sender-id of hsbc.co.uk

If the ip address of this email does not come from the ip address supplied by HSBC then it is trashed or returned to sender. I prefer return to sender so they get the message that they are wasting their time and their mail isn't getting through. Simple ? or not ?

If they don't want to use ip addresses, what about encrypted passwords ?

Will someone explain to me why this would not work. Surely just a few lines of coding, but it needs businesses and isps to talk to each other. ?