The New York Times has an interesting piece on the increase in spam in the last six months.
According to the NYT:
– Spammers are “conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners.”
– “The sudden appearance of new sources of spam makes it more difficult for companies to rely on blacklists of known junk e-mail distributors. Also, by using other people’s computers to scatter their e-mail across the Internet, spammers vastly increase the number of messages they can send out, without having to pay for the data traffic they generate.”
– Spammers also realized that sending spam in the form of an image would effectively thwart the text filters which analyze the content of an incoming message. “The use of other people’s computers to send their bandwidth-hogging e-mail made the tactic practical.”