Spammers won’t give up

The war on spam continues, with some gains and some losses.

But don’t for a second think we’re coming anywhere close to a Mission Accomplished moment. Not against spam, an industry run by clever minds who always find new ways to deliver their messages.

If you hadn’t noticed, the spam onslaught has only grown bigger.

“In the past four months we’ve noticed a 22 percent total increase in the volume of spam reaching our customers,” said Ross Fubini, senior director of engineering for Symantec, one of the country’s biggest computer security companies.

Symantec reports the largest spam group by category is the kind containing embedded images, featuring a pitch for medications, for example, or auto insurance. Spam filters seldom catch this type of spam since the content of the image is not scanned for offensive or predefined terms.

“That’s the most common spam we’re getting, by far,” said Garv Brakel, the city of Spokane’s director of information services.

He said the city gets between 80,000 and 100,000 incoming e-mail messages daily. Easily 90 percent are caught as spam in a spam filter.

Both the city and Spokane County use special tools, a combination of hardware and software, that typically block nearly all the spam targeted at their workers’ machines.

Bill Fiedler, director of the county’s information systems group, said spam makes up 89 percent of each day’s messages.

The county spends $5,000 to $6,000 a year on equipment and licenses just to keep the problem in check, he said.

Despite hefty investments by companies and security developers to improve spam protection, the ingenious brains behind spam push on with new ways to deliver those messages.

Fubini said spammers have just introduced the twist of having spam messages sent to instant messenger users. “I got one at 2 in the morning,” he said. Thinking it was from a friend, he clicked through the message link and found himself at a spam site.

Another cagey innovation is the arrival of invisible spam that burrows into a computer, hidden inside a user’s browser. “We’re just researching this tactic. We’re not sure what the pattern is or why they’re being developed,” Fubini said.

He called that approach “very wily,” comparing the threat to a sleeper terrorist cell, in that the virus introduced via the browser seems to wake up at some later point. The end goal of that approach is still being studied, said Fubini. It might be another method spammers are testing to extend the reach of spam botnets — vast networks of PCs that are all compromised to send out spam, unbeknownst to the company or agency that owns the computers.

Another reason behind the 22 percent growth in spam, he added, is the evolution of broadband. As more people in the United States upgrade to higher-speed broadband Internet service, the percentage of spam coming from this country increases, he said. While the spam wave has grown 22 percent, Symantec has improved its countermeasures as well. The company says its corporate customers have improved anti-spam effectiveness by 27 percent in the past four months.

“So, the spam war is increasing, but we’re winning the war,” Fubini said.