The amount of blog-spam that Geek Drivel has gotten recently is ludicrous. Since late June (when the statistics were last reset), my anti-spam software has blocked nearly 42,000 spam messages (of which I saw and had to personally deal with maybe fifteen — that software is good). Roughly 15,000 of them came in between then and the end of October. The other 27,000 have come in since the beginning of November — i.e. in the last two months. That’s roughly 450 (failed) attempts a day, up from about 120 a day before Hallowe’en.
I don’t know what’s behind the near-quadrupling of spam attempts, or whether it’s linked to the massive amount of e-mail spam that everyone seems to be getting recently, but it’s looking more and more like a new botnet.
I really wish people would secure their systems so that botnets couldn’t happen. I really wish that software developers would secure their programs so that malware cretins couldn’t exploit them to break into systems. I really wish the malware guys would just go play real-life Frogger (very badly). But mostly, I really wish that 2011 will be the year that the Internet becomes spam-free while staying completely usable.
Of course, I don’t expect any of those to happen.
374 spam attempts in the 11 hours since I reset the spam-blocker. It’ll be interesting to see whether it dies down now that the holidays are over… if it’s a new botnet at work, I don’t expect it to die down unless and until some security researcher breaks the botnet, a task which is becoming increasingly difficult.