This is great news (he wrote sarcastically):
New zombies now routinely request new IP addresses from their ISPs, so anti-spam software that works by blocking spam based the originating IP addresses can no longer effectively halt them, the company said in its most recent quarterly Internet Threats Trend Report.
While some ISPs deny their request to change IP address, others accede, giving them new IP addresses in real time, Amir Lev, chief technology officer at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH), told InternetNews.com. The result is that zombies can change addresses much faster than most security services and software can respond, which means their users are not protected, Lev said.
Why do ISPs allow such a thing? Is there a legitimate reason that couldn’t be handled by a personal phone call? If not, there should be pressure on them to stop this.
I mean, come on. A hundred and fifty billion spam emails a day? Just think how much cheaper bandwidth might be if the majority of it wasn’t spam.
Well, the obvious next step is to block the range of IP addresses the ISP can assign, maybe even as a first step. This would be a good thing, as it would put pressure on any legitimate ISP to cooperate in the spam war.
The seamy underbelly of spamming is that it’s profitable for ISPs. Spammers buy large pipes and pay relatively hefty fees, and, of course, they don’t complain about the fact that the network goes down for 20 minutes here and there, or that download speeds suck after dinner, et cetera. Fat fees, zero customer service issues — what business wouldn’t like that? So the ISPs tend to be, shall we say, a bit lackadaisical about spam-fighting. This is even more true for ISPs that are on the shady side already.
The solution to spam is to take the profit motive out of spamming. I’ve thought that flooding there sites or advertisers with (non-purchasing) hits, might generate results. When the price of spam is more than the revenue it generates it will stop.
Solutions such as blocking the spam will never work in the long term. The more spam you remove, the more the revenue the spam that gets thru will generate. This gives people incentives to figure out how to get around whatever system people set up to block spam.
I’ve been playing too much Left4Dead lately. I read this and all I could think about was a zombie sitting at a computer trying to access the internet. But then his fingers fell off — and we thought carpal tunnel was bad.
Better yet, a zombie sitting at a computer downloading pictures of brain pron.
Okay I’ll stop….
zombie: a computer hijacked to serve a master other than the proper owner. So we have both the crime of spamming and the crime of hijacking computers. The spammer is not paying for the bandwidth the zombies are using.
What about the major lines of software that make hijacking large numbers of computers so easy?