Re: [LUG] Junk Mail

[Simon Avery <digdilem@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 May 2014 14:52, Martijn Grooten <martijn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 01:29:44PM +0100, Simon Avery wrote:
> > It did hit a point where I took an active interest in reducing it by
> > adding to the troubles of those instigating it, and of course
> > increasing my efforts to persuade people not to host the spammers'
> > software of choice - Microsoft Windows.
>
> More than a few linux systems are compromised and churning out spam.
> Perhaps not as many as Windows, but it's by no means a Windows disease.

If there's one thing that's changed in spam in the past few years, it's
a shift towards spam sent from mostly compromised servers, almost all of
which run Linux. According to some figures, about half of today's spam
is sent through such servers.

That's interesting, I hadn't realised it was quite that much, but it makes sense.

A friend who runs a hosting company quite frequently has to suspend vm's that have been compromised in this way. And he has a foreign group who use stolen credit card details to rent vms specifically for this purpose. He's quite good at his job and has some early-warning systems, but it does take a fair bit of his time to counter.

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