Crazy Spam Deluge

Spammers are learning, but so are we

Email customers of Montague WebWorks may have noticed a slight increase in the amount of spam they are receiving from out there. Mik Muller, owner of Montague WebWorks, contacted his anti-spam vendor, Linda Pagillo of Mail's Best Friend, for some advice. This is what Linda said...

Hi Mik. The last few weeks or so have seen a significant uptick in pre-tested spam with very high volumes. We have been getting quite a lot of complaints about it, but essentially, by definition, the spammer pre-tests their campaign against all available tests by sending samples to themselves on protected systems... when they have a version that gets past all of the tests they fire it off in huge volumes with their bot-net [a network of infected computers that send the email for them so it's not all coming from one server]. As much as possible we stay ahead of them by predicting what their next rounds are likely to be -- and often that works, but if they manage to pre-test against us then they beat that also.

As you have may have seen, these messages are bypassing all spam defenses including Declude, Commtouch and Message Sniffer.  [BTW, Montague WebWorks uses Declude and Message Sniffer.]

We are working on adding additional tests in Declude to try combat this. Also getting samples to Message Sniffer will help Message Sniffer create rules as soon as there is a new wave to prevent some of these outbreaks. Send spam samples that slip through to spam@armresearch.com. I would like to see the traffic your Message Sniffer is currently dealing with.

Linda Pagillo
Mail's Best Friend
www.mailsbestfriend.com

So there you have it. If you get any spam, please forward it on to the email address above so they can analyze it and figure out how to stop it.

Thanks,

Mik