A rarity - I'm proven wrong!
The other day, I posted that the Christmas season is upon us and that there has not been a major correlation between an expected rise in Christmas spam and the actual spam that we are seeing on our networks.
However, I believe that I have now seen such evidence. Last Friday, December 14, we experienced our highest traffic day ever. It was 28% higher than our previous record holder! That is huge! Furthermore, Saturday, December 15 was our second highest day ever, 7% higher than the earlier record holder.
How do I know that this does not correspond to us getting a huge influx of new customers? I know this because our total delivery count to end users remained constant. In fact, on the Friday, we actually had a better-than-average spam day (ie, we filtered a little bit more spam than we normally do). Saturday didn't look as great but my projected legitimate numbers for weekends seem out of whack. But, it still looked to be a normal day. In other words, spammers hit us harder but we didn't even flinch.
This sudden burst of spam has to be explained by something. Either spammers were sending around a large burst of Christmas spam or there was a new botnet that just came online. I'm going to attribute it to a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. So, while I may have been wrong about not seeing any Christmas spam, on the bright side, we handled it rather well!