According to Symantec the amount of unsolicited junk email (SPAM) has risen but just under 30% in the past two months.  Total Quality Management Cubed maintain blacklists of spammers and have seen a 450% increase in two months.  In days gone by SPAM was sent from single servers or in some cases even PC’s.  As corporations have developed more effective methods of detecting and blocking these spam relaying servers and ISP’s have increased their cooperation with authorities to help convict the individuals behind them; spammers have turned to a more distributed tactic.  I have previously discussed ‘Bot nets’ in my blogs–these networks of compromised computers are being increasingly linked to spam, phishing and other such illegal activities.  One spammer used a Bot net to hit anti-spam provider Blue Security with a hugely distributed denial of service attack it took days for Blue Security to recover and they have now exited the anti-spam business.

It seems the only way this problem can be solved is by educating computer users, not only to stop buying from spammers but to keep their home computers free from virus and malware infection!