In Daniel Suarez’s novel, Daemon, a program-like process is created by a recently deceased computer genius. The program – called the Daemon – proceeds to set up a new world order via technology. And in one of the best bits, orchestrates a the mass slaughter of almost 7,000 spammers around the world. It was brutal, but I’ll tell you, it was one of those things you wished could really happen.
Spam, that annoying but ignorable scourge of the Web, has finally recovered from the jolt it received last November, when Internet backbone providers cut off McColo Corp., a California Web-hosting service that spammers were using to coordinate e-mail attacks. The average seven-day spam volume during the latter half of March is now at roughly the same levels as October of last year—around 94 percent of all e-mail—according to anti-spam company Postini, a division of Google. At first, the McColo takedown cut global spam traffic by about 70 percent, according to Postini, which provides e-mail security for more than 50,000 businesses and 15 million business users. “By far, it was the most dramatic event we have ever seen,” said Adam Swidler, product marketing manager for Postini Services. But this year, average spam volumes have increased about 1.2 percent each day. And there is evidence that spammers are now building more decentralized, peer-to-peer spamming botnets that no longer rely on the visible and vulnerable control nodes that they were using at McColo to guide their spam e-mail campaigns. – From NY Times
