'Pump-and-Dump' Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders

eWeek has a great article talking about a recent investigation into a botnet known to be sending out a good chunk of the spam you see. The bot herders seem to be Russian. Go figure. With 70,000 plus bots, they can pump out over a billion spams a day. The big question is what to do about it.

Law Enforcement agencies seem to have bigger fish to fry. They're not interested and pretty useless here. The only way to really effectively stop this kind of activity is through the Internet Service Providers. The ISPs need to take infected machines OFFLINE completely. No three strikes. No ignoring reports. If you see a bot on your net, you pull the plug. Period. Revenue loss? Probably. But you also get lost revenue back form less spam, less time tweaking spam filters, and less time futzing with do I or don't I terminate the account. You have a bot you get your service turned off till you get rid of it. Period. No second chances.

The next step is to lobby Law Enforcement and law makers to go after those responsible. Put these criminals in jail. No fines. Jail. On the first offense. This needs to include the spammer, the email harvester, the programmer who wrote the bot, the company being advertized, and the banking systems that process the payments. You're involved in spam, you get your assets frozen and you go to jail.

Over 93% of all email traffic is spam. And it is on the rise. It needs to be clobbered HARD. I've seen an 8-fold increase in the last 6 months. It is insane. It needs to stop.