Spammers Must Have A Day Job

By Guy Bunker | September 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

It’s a Monday morning and the first task is to go through email – while virtually all spam is now caught by various spam filters there is still the odd one that gets through. One was for a credit card with $19.7m credited to it – you might be able to guess where it purported to come from… Nigeria. So no change there… there were then the usual watches and performance enhancing substances, but it is the splog which gets me. By the end of the weekend there were nearly 300 spam blog (splog – geddit!?!) messages waiting for me. Virtually all were the same – just a set of links offering ‘interesting’ pictures and videos.

Why is it always so bad on a Monday, I can only think that the average spammer has a day job – so the weekend comes around and they then decided to go spamming in search of extra cash. We have seen an increase in the number of commercially available spam/splog packages in the underground economy - meaning that anyone and everyone can turn their hand to it. But… don’t they realise that they are all buying exactly the same thing, which is why on Monday morning there are hundreds of email / blog posts all the same? The good news is that it makes it easier for anti-spam/splog vendors to spot and block or automatically delete - the bad news is that it clutters up networks, email in-boxes and most importantly wastes people’s time.

So… on one side, ensure you have some good anti-spam filtering installed and regularly updated, you will save a lot of time and effort. And if you are a weekend spammer – stick to the day job… unless you can come up with something novel… and even then stick to the day job.

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