Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History

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Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History

Dec 14, 2007 11:08 AM PDT
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With Google's recent Postini addition, it now reports to be processing email for more than 35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and blocking around 1 billion messages per day. According to today's report by Google, in 2007, Postini data centers recorded the highest levels of spam and virus attacks in history. Much of it fueled by an increase in the number of botnet computers.

From the report: "We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47 billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a lot of spam). The average unprotected email user would have received 32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam can cost a company up to $742 per user. ...But what's really different this year is the innovation with which spammers attempted to evade detection by spam filters."

Read full story: Google Inc.

See related topics: Cyberattack, Security, Spam

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Re: Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History Suresh Ramasubramanian – Dec 15, 2007 9:52 AM PDT

Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in back in September of 2006

Jesus. He first saw botnets in 2006? Now that's late. Real late - and probably not what you want to admit in a PR whitepaper being fed to media.

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Re: Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History Dave Howe – Dec 18, 2007 6:09 PM PDT

Suresh Ramasubramanian said:

Jesus. He first saw botnets in 2006? Now that's late. Real late - and probably not what you want to admit in a PR whitepaper being fed to media.

Its quite possibly accurate. I saw a shift around the middle to late 2006 from the previous use of open relays, Chinese ISPs and free trial accounts to active abuse of the increasingly bandwidth-rich and insecure home user segment via increasingly sophisticated trojans and worms, which indeed were using the same botnet technology that had been used for DDOS attacks. IIRC, the ORDB closed up shop around the same period as there were fewer and fewer attackers chasing fewer and fewer open relays.

Before then, the major danger from compromised machines was the virus and worm traffic probing and of course the aformentioned DDOS packet storms.... it was more an abusive kiddie tool than a serious commercial resource.

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Re: Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History Suresh Ramasubramanian – Dec 18, 2007 6:26 PM PDT

Well, viruses emitting spam started off with sobig / sober, at least two years before 2006 - shall we say 2004.

Those two were the first, crudest version of spam emitting botnets, I'd say.

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