Leading anti-spam systems experience significant drops in effectiveness when both sender and content are unknown, most commonly when botnets are used.
Several times a day, when spam floods through with the help of botnets - it's all hands on deck while the lab figures out where that mail is coming from and how to plug the dike this time.
Sometimes the fix is elegant and long lasting, and sometimes it is not. The new technique can be network oriented or content oriented, and in either case the dip is what results. From an end users and a service provider's perspective you can flip this curve upside down and the dips become peak traffic loads, spam outbreaks, help desk calls and flooded inboxes. Dips happen because anti-spam companies cannot have perfect insight into the spamming world.
It takes enormous visibility and time to turn a new attack into the actionable quantities of known content and known senders.
- It takes the best filters 10 minutes to widely deploy a new filter rule capable of really making a dent in a new spam campaign.
- The blacklists take between 15 and 30 minutes to set up and distribute a new IP block.
Traffic Control slows unknown senders down so a new filter rule can be set up - and takes away spammers' head start.
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