US FTC Shutdown of 3FN Effect on Spam: None?
by Jose NazarioI’ve been monitoring spam using ATLAS for a while now, keeping track of spamming botnets etc using a spam trap. The shutdown of 3FN by the US FTC supposedly had an effect on spam levels. We saw this last fall with the 75% drop in spam after McColo was de-peered. Are we seeing it with 3FN?
I’m not so sure.
Below is a graphic showing you the top 50 countries sending our spam traps messages uniqued by sending IP and subject (which is designed to measure how big a spam botnet is, as opposed to mail message volumes). Note that the US FTC announcement was June 4, 2009.
On June 4 we see a big spike in spam activities (more bots sending more unique messages). This isn’t what we expected.
Still investigating but I don’t think we’ll see the kind of drops we saw last fall here.
Where are places like ComputerWorld getting their numbers then?
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134147