Google Says Spam Volumes On the Rise 187
alphadogg writes "Despite security researchers' efforts to cut spam down to size, it just keeps growing back. The volume of unsolicited email in the first quarter was around 6 percent higher than a year earlier, according to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini. Security researchers have won a few significant battles against the spammers in the last year, first against those hosting the spammers' control systems, and later against the control systems themselves, but they will have to change tactics again if they want to win the war. In the first half of last year, security researchers concentrated their efforts on identifying the ISPs or hosting companies that allowed command-and-control servers to operate, and shutting these botnet purveyors down. The success of that tactic was short-lived, however."
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
Network bandwidth taken by emails is indeed nearly free -- a typical piece of spam is just around 5KB (median). Yet, with more and more complex processing needed to run spam filters, you need quite a bit of CPU to weed them out. Looking at my logs, SpamAssassin runs are around 8 seconds each. Part of that time is spent for DNS queries, but there's a number of CPU-intensive tests as well.
And servers are certainly not free.
Re:If One Person Clicks, We All Lose (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If One Person Clicks, We All Lose (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you realize just how much time, energy (electricity to run the infrastructure, cool said infrastructure etc), and manpower is wasted because of spam.
Lets put it this way.
To deal with spam at my company, we use a 10-server cluster. This cluster may seem excessive to you... but note that we get alarms once or twice daily that the load on one of the nodes has exceeded critical levels.
Now, comes the fun part.
These servers use about 3 amps each, at 110v RMS. If left without cooling, they would quickly melt down - so add on the air conditioning. I won't factor the AC into this calculation because it cools many other things too, but just be aware of it's presence.
So, we have 30 ampers at 110v 24/7/365. Now P=VA (where P = watts) so:
3300 = 30 * 110
These servers are responsible for a total energy use of 3.3 kW on average. Every day has 24 hours, and lets settle on say 29 days/m. This comes out to 696 hours per month. 3.3 kW * 696 = 2296.8 kWh per month.
Holy shit! This is a fairly small datacenter too.
So, you see... take this little anecdotal calculation and scale it up worldwide... and you begin to see the problem.