"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
2 January 2007A pause in the disasterI've had generally kind words for Movable Type's version 3.xx spam tools; while the nasty stuff still comes in, none of it actually gets put on the site, which is fine with me. For the last week or so, though, there has been literally no incoming spam, not even on TrackBacks, where most of them materialize. Since it's too much to hope that the scumbuckets have mended their ways, I went looking for a more plausible explanation, and here's what I found:
Bot-net tracker group Shadowserver noticed a gigantic drop in infected systems on Christmas Day. the total number dropped from more than 500,000 to less than 400,000, or more than 20%. Another independent group confirmed a 10% drop on their numbers. What's the deal?
Well, interestingly enough, the combination of people getting newly purchased, XP Service Pack 2 PCs (or Macs), combined with machines not being turned on for the holidays and people being away from work, made the number of infected PCs decrease dramatically. I suppose this means I should brace myself, starting about ten minutes from now, for an all-out assault on my scripts. Update, 7:30 am: It took a whole hour for the first spam to show up. |