Update on spam levels

My original plan when doing the series on sender authentication (which is not yet finished) was to write a series of uninterrupted posts.  I didn't want to break my mometum by diverting to another topic.

However, as serendipity would have it, the start of my series coincided exactly with the start of a new spam outbreak.  I've been wanting to comment on it but at the same time wanted to maintain my discipline by staying on topic.  My desire to do both were contradictory, and ultimately, my desire to comment on the latest spam outbreak has won over. 

On our networks, we are seeing more traffic in the past three weeks than we have ever seen in the history of our network.  And, it's not by a small margin, it's by a very large margin.  In fact, Wednesday, June 27, we saw twice as many messages as the daily average for April and May.  I've been commenting to others around the office that we are blocking more spam per day than McDonald's sells hamburgers.

I don't know what's behind this latest outbreak.  Perhaps Robert Soloway sold his zombie network to spammers who have woken up his sleeping giant; perhaps the virus outbreak we saw a couple of months ago was lying in stasis, just waiting to rear its ugly head.  In any event, the spam breakout to the upside (which started in June) is definitely outside of the statistical parameters of standard deviation and we are, indeed, in a new blizzard of spam.

This reminds me of last year when we saw the same thing... at around the same time.