Why is EITS combating spam on UGAMail?
EITS constantly monitors spam because of the problems that it can cause for students, faculty, and staff at UGA by clogging up email inboxes — and because of the detrimental effect it has on the UGAMail system itself. The rate of spam has drastically increased over the past several years and has risen to unprecedented levels in the past few months. According to an October 27, 2006, article that appeared in Security Focus News, estimates are as high as a 450% increase in spam over the 8 months preceding that article. The increase is due in part to the increased use of “botnets,” which are networks of compromised PCs, as the originating point for the spam. Instead of single computers sending out spam, spammers are using the resources of thousands of computers to send out millions of spam messages, which makes it harder to detect the source of the spam. Spam is also increasingly more difficult to detect by spam filters since spammers are using embedded images and other techniques to get
