Email spam levels hit 90.4% of all email traffic in June, unchanged since May. Spam from botnets accounted for around 83.2% of all spam in June, according to MessageLabs. The rest is sent from compromised mail servers and webmail accounts. Some of the smaller botnets can also control the sending of spam through webmail accounts in such a way as to make it appear as though there is a real person behind the use of each webmail account.
Spam is a good business to be in. While there are automated ones, using CAPTCHA-breaking tools, there are also businesses that specialize in providing real people to break CAPTCHA manually. Workers can be expected to receive approximately two to three dollars per 1,000 accounts created which are then sold to the spammers for around $30 to $40.
According to MessageLabs, image spam, blamed for the significant rise in spam activity in May, has become even more sustained during June, now accounting for between 8 and 10% of all spam intercepted. Attached to spam messages, rather than being hosted remotely and included using HTML images, some of these more recent examples include background noise patterns that have been generated automatically.
June’s spam level is the highest level since 2007, according to MediaPost.
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