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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Wednesday, October 5, 2005
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Phish down, spam up Posted by Era @ 12:01 GMT

Graph showing recent tidal rise in spam (44k image)

Over the last week or so, the volume of spam has been rising markedly. There is of course some variation between domains, but here is one typical example, from one of the domains we monitor.

At the same time, the number of phishing messages has been stabilizing. At one point in July, there was a tremendous number of basically identical Ebay and PayPal scam messages in transit, but we are no longer seeing those in large numbers (although they are still around, but in modest volumes).

This marked rise appears to be caused by a large number of matchmaking spams. So it would seem that the activities of a single determined (or crazy, if you will) spammer can still make a difference.

Unfortunately, we hereby speculate that no corresponding sharp decline will be noticed when this vandal is nailed ...