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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Suresh Ramasubramanian's job is to stop junk e-mail from ever getting to your in box. But for every spammer he blocks, a dozen more rise up.
Mar 27, 2003 | It was the end of another 12-hour day filled with hostility, deception and confusion, and an exhausted Suresh Ramasubramanian, a systems administrator at a Hong Kong ISP, was finally getting ready to head home.
On his way out the door he happened to take one last look at the network status and noticed that a mail bomb -- a flood of incoming spam messages -- had just begun.
Ramasubramanian realized he probably wouldn't be getting any sleep that night.
He spent the next eight hours struggling to block the spam attack and contain the damage. The huge volumes of mail the spammer was sending -- several hundred thousand messages at a time from different Internet protocol (IP) addresses at the rate of 20,000 every 10 minutes -- was clogging his servers and seriously slowing down mail service to his legitimate users.
Stopping a spam surge usually isn't rocket science; skilled workers can trace and trap a spam flood within a few minutes by determining what IP address the spam is coming from and then blocking access to the spammed servers from that IP address.
Unfortunately, expert spammers can also switch IP addresses as quickly as the blocks are applied. Ramasubramanian wasn't surprised to see that each time he located the IP address the spammer was spewing from and blocked it, the spammer quickly jumped to another IP address.
"It's intense, because you're trying to stay right ahead of them and at the same time you're having to clean up the unholy mess they are making on your servers," says Ramasubramanian. "This kind of job tends to age a guy very quickly."
Eventually the spammer gave up -- at least for that night. But there would be plenty more to replace him the next day. And the next. Working the spam-abuse desk is an endless job, filled with hostility coming from all sides. Spammers complain that their rights are being infringed upon. Spam recipients howl with anger at the daily flood. Even other spam fighters fuel the frenzy, mistakenly considering people like Ramasubramanian enemies instead of friends. And no matter what you do, still the spam comes.
Despite many people's best efforts, spam is on the rise. According to statistics from Brightmail, an anti-spam software vendor, about 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001. Most spam experts assume that within the next year at least half of all e-mail will be spam.
Imagine what your in box might look like without the efforts of Ramasubramanian and his cohorts.
