How come only spammers are up at 2am?!?

punk-roc · January 2011

So I'm sitting at work, passing the time, and no one is up posting except spammers..

And its not fun reporting the spammers!

Anyways, carry on all.. just thought the CP forum would feel bad if only spammers were posting now.

Jason (part-time night owl)

txcoastal1 · January 2011

I have notied CP has been getting pummeled lately

Jstas · January 2011

Because they aren't from the U.S. in most cases and it's a reasonable hour in other time zones.

ryanjoachim · January 2011

And also because the rest of us have to work for a living.

danger boy · January 2011

hey I resent your post..

I am the spammer !!

punk-roc · January 2011

lol, you need a link in your sig than! didnt mean to leave you out.. spam away.. I'll make sure to "view" it, would hate for the spam to go un-read

Jason

Jstas · January 2011

Info about recent influx of spam.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/spam_volumes_return/

Spam volumes double as Rustock botnet wakes

Great, I was wondering where I could get cheap viagra

By John Leyden

Posted in Spam, 11th January 2011 11:40 GMT

Free whitepaper The Register Guide to Enterprise Virtualization

Spam volumes have returned to normal following a holiday lull that saw a drastic reduction of junk mail.

The Rustock botnet is out of hibernation and back in business, spewing copious volumes of useless junk mail courtesy of hundreds of thousands of compromised Windows machines.

Rustock (which specialises in spamvertising unlicensed pharmaceutical websites) is the biggest single source of global spam. Its return on 10 January resulted in the doubling (98 per cent increase) of global junk mail volumes over the course of just 24 hours, MessageLabs reports.

Other botnets have also returned to business following the end of the festive season. For example, the Xarvester botnet has also returned, following a blitz on its command and control servers.

Websense reports much the same dramatic surge on global spam volumes over the same time period between Sunday and Monday, as its chart here illustrates.

MessageLabs and other security watchers remain in the dark over the cause of the Xmas spam "armistice". This isn't a seasonal variation seen in previous years, but something new and thus far unexplained.

One popular theory is that the botmaster controlling spam-spewing machines simply took a break and cracked open the vodka, but there's no real evidence for this.

Nine in 10 of all email messages circulating on the net are spam. ®

botnets don't affect just email. There are ones that hit twitter accounts, Facebook, forums, usenet and bulletin boards as well.

What sucks is that such a useful tool like email has be rendered unusable because of spam. Most people delete legitimate email with impunity when doing mass deletions of spam.

bobman1235 · January 2011

Unusable may be an overstatement. My gmail account is pretty solid, even after several years. Maybe one or two filtered spam messages a day. I can't remember the last time one slipped through the filter, or that I saw a legitimate email (outside of some kind of marketing thing that TECHNICALLY wouldn't be spam as it was a purchase followup) in my Spam folder.