What's up with the sudden surge in spam the last few days?

[AJR]

I don't know what it is, but the spam I'm getting has been in overdrive the last few days.  When this same thing happened a while back, I made a concerted effort to attack the problem and it slowed down to a trickle, maybe a few a day, which I can tolerate.  But now they're coming in droves probably 30-40 a day, all of a sudden.

 

Is spam assassin not working or something?

 

anyone else have this problem?

 

thanks

 

 

[Tony]

Hello,

 

What I'm guessing is happening is you're seeing the rise and fall of the amount of spam on the internet.  We've seen a sharp increase the past week in compromised web sites and email accounts via some new exploits.  We're not alone on this so it stands to reason with the increase there is more spam getting out while I doubt it's coming from our systems I imagine from others it may be reaching our servers.

 

It makes sense mostly if you have a 500% increase in spam on the internet you're probably going to see a lot more spam getting past filters as a result.

[tekiegreg]

Yeah, Spam is an interesting beast.  Swaying up and down in my inbox.  Lately it's been on an uptrend and I've been busily adding keyword filters to zap increasingly more.  Keyword filtering in CPanel can be very effective at eliminating the worst offenders and keeping things to a dull roar.

 

 

Hello,

 

What I'm guessing is happening is you're seeing the rise and fall of the amount of spam on the internet.  We've seen a sharp increase the past week in compromised web sites and email accounts via some new exploits.  We're not alone on this so it stands to reason with the increase there is more spam getting out while I doubt it's coming from our systems I imagine from others it may be reaching our servers.

 

It makes sense mostly if you have a 500% increase in spam on the internet you're probably going to see a lot more spam getting past filters as a result.

[Brian]

Yeah, Spam is an interesting beast.  Swaying up and down in my inbox.  Lately it's been on an uptrend and I've been busily adding keyword filters to zap increasingly more.  Keyword filtering in CPanel can be very effective at eliminating the worst offenders and keeping things to a dull roar.

 

Definitely one of the more effective (albeit tedious) ways to filter spam, I know a large contingent of our userbase does this on a regular basis. Tony alluded to it with the increase in spam/attacks but with the global attacks on Wordpress installations over the past week (Refer to: http://blog.cloudflare.com/patching-the-internet-fixing-the-wordpress-br) we're not at all surprised to see more compromises, which directly results in more spam.

 

The Internet is a fickle beast.

[biblestudyoutlines]

Brian, you must be ignorant and saying this without knowing that someone has acted as a fake person and maliciously reported my account. Please take a look at reported message on the Hawkhost ticket sent to you as abuse by the malicious person. I should have pay by month. I pay for the whole year and now this happen. I thought I wanted to update my website on Saturday and then I shared it on Facebook. Just see how many users on Hawkhost are already affected and you say it is normal. And now, this happen?

[Tony]

Brian, you must be ignorant and saying this without knowing that someone has acted as a fake person and maliciously reported my account. Please take a look at reported message on the Hawkhost ticket sent to you as abuse by the malicious person. I should have pay by month. I pay for the whole year and now this happen. I thought I wanted to update my website on Saturday and then I shared it on Facebook. Just see how many users on Hawkhost are already affected and you say it is normal. And now, this happen?

 

This was not a complaint we provided you proof straight from the mail server queues.  Your account was caught sending spam from many of it's email accounts causing email delivery problems for many other customers.  You cannot expect a web host to allow an account to be sending large amounts of spam to others causing blacklistings.  Many other providers at this point would have provided you with a large bill for the administrative time spent dealing with the spam your account sent.

[biblestudyoutlines]

I did not created those email accounts. I did not even know about it until I saw this automated support ticket you forwarded to me.

[Brian]

This issue has been addressed in both a ticket and another forum thread, replying for the sake of clarity here.

[tcat]

I also noticed this a few weeks ago.  I have 7 employees with "Account level filtering" set to send spam to trash folder.  Filter is "Spam Status begins with Yes, deliver to Trash".  For the past 2 years our main trash folder would get 250-350 spams per day, I'd dump approx. 2000 per week.  A few weeks ago each employee started getting an extra 25-50 spams per day, our trash folder at cPanel now gets zero.  I did not change any settings, but I did notice a new cPanel "look".  Something changed!