The Internet Axis of Evil

Back in October I was thinking and writing a lot about spam and viruses. Both were in the news a lot back then and some industry observers were worried that these two evils were going to hold back the great promise of the Internet.

Then for some reason, I stopped thinking about spam and viruses so much and moved on to other areas of interest. But all of a sudden, these twin evils are back front and center in my mind. Mostly because while I was offline most of last week, my laptop was unable to update its virus definition files every night and I became vulnerable to a virus infection, which slammed me this morning. It took me most of the day to get my laptop back to health. And on top of that, my inbox is getting more spam these days than it has in a while.

I had thought that spam was getting under control. We use Positini and it works pretty well. I recently read that AOL has seen spam coming into its network drop by almost 25%. But Brightmail, a company that i have an investment in, shows that spam levels keep rising in almost linear fashion. If you extrapolate the Brightmail chart another two years, about 95% of all email on the Internet will be spam. That doesn't seem possible, but the line in the Brightmail chart doesn't appear to be non-linear at this point.

And then there's the issue of viruses. I don't know if viruses are getting worse or not. I spent a little time this afternoon surfing the net for data on that and came up empty. If any of you out there have trend data on virus activity, i'd love to see it. My personal experience of the last day leads me to believe that its not getting any better and that there's still substantial virus risk even for protected users. I have a virus filter on my mail server and my laptop and still got infected. Even if virus activity isn't increasing at the same rate as spam activity, i have a feeling that the viruses themselves are getting nastier.

What's the point of all of this? There's a downside to an open network. It's the same downside that exists in an open society. There are a lot of nuts out there who want to do bad things (the evildoers as George W Bush calls them). And we all have to spend a lot of time and money making sure that we are protected from them. It's a huge burden on an open network and an open society, but i see no way around it.

Comments

[Tom Watson]

Fred - "There's a downside to an open network. It's the same downside that exists in an open society."
That's one the best descriptions of the all-too prevelent anti-social behavoir online that i've seen.

[Gericke]

http://www.securitystats.com/virusstats.html

Virus activity is often linked to the leakage of Windows source code. This happened just a short while ago so up goes activity.

Spam and virii are good things. They force us to innovate. The fact that these twin evils are not hampered by standard issue inventions however shows us that technology isn't up to scratch in its core. So no refinements or add-ons could effectively stop the deluge of junk on the net.

It also reflects the weakness of the culture that drives the Internet. If we were to believe that success drives spammers, then we live in a society that is physically ill all the time (get your pills on the cheap) and men have tiny, inactive genitals (V.I.A.G.R.A.).

We need to learn the true meaning of "enough", have some real innovation and acquire better eating habits.

G.

[Druce Vertes]

Soon these clever virus writers will spread one that stealthily sniffs passwords to online financial institutions, instead of loudly DoSing MSFT or SCO. Then one fine day they'll transferring away, to say Antigua.

They probably couldn't get away with the money but they could create chaos in the banking system, maybe runs on banks or a bank holiday, and perhaps some new missions for the 101st.

We're way too complacent, what with Yodlee-type aggregation services storing our passwords, and lots of companies seemingly having the authority to do an ACH debit from my account on their say-so that I OK'ed it on the phone. Where's Richard Clarke when you need him?

That being said, a combination of Spamcop IP-filtering, SpamAssassin content filtering, and Cloudmark collaborative filtering put an end to the spam problem for me. Although I'm less sensitive than some to losing a legitimate email now and then...

[hugh macleod]

If viruses were any different we'd call them something else.

[compelled_to_reply]

Viruses:
I believe the increase is due to increased connectivity. Mobility, greater numbers, more opportunity. The severity of each case, however, I do not (generally) see as more dangerous. YMMV. I've been looking at viruses again in the past 2 weeks -- I have no practical conclusions to make as of yet, However, I suspect the "large view" will be companies giving out products which are insecure by default, and not providing the means or education to change this. Also, the user base is largely unwilling or unable to invest the huge chunks of time in antivirus efforts.

On Spam: "Spam Free at Last" (interesting, although technical)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/16/13579/3506

[Ben Choi]

First things first, best of luck with the Brightmail IPO.

On virus stats, Messagelabs has some great flash animations of historical viruses and their spread geographically. Not particularly useful, but fascinating to watch. It'd be interesting to see similar studies for spam. http://www.messagelabs.com/viruseye/threats/

[Viva Loreen]

see you again ..

[Lina Marie]

It´s really a great joy being here. Your site is a varied mixture of the latest news, specified information and
activ power.

[Earle]

Let's not forget blog referrer spam. yuck!