The spam constant

It may sound strange, but the volume of spam is pretty much a constant; sharp fluctuations are usually linked to a major event – the closure of McColo meant a very noticeable drop in the amount of spam circulating.

But this month the opposite seems to be true. Here’s a little graph of our spam stats for 15th – 23rd April. The fluctuations are pretty striking.

For the last two days, though, we’ve been receiving about the average amount of spam. We couldn’t come up with a logical explanation for the sharp increase – the obvious suspect, Kido (and Iksmas, which it downloads to infected machines) hadn’t shown any unusual burst of activity.

But then we remembered that over here in Russia, we celebrated Easter on 19 April. Spammers are people and have lives too – the statistics indicate that they took time off and then started sending a lot of spam to make up for missed time.

Cases like this are rare, but if anything changes, and the amount of spam starts fluctuating wildly, we’ll keep you posted as to why.