Recently, someone (or some bot, according to this article) has decided to use my domain name for sending spam. This means that when that spam is rejected, the rejection notices are coming back to me! This has increased the amount of spam that I am receiving a lot.
It turns out that I am not alone.
Bot nets likely behind jump in spam
Estimates of the magnitude of the increase in junk e-mail vary, but experts agree that an uncommon surge in spam is occurring. On the low side, Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus, has found that average spam volume has increased almost 30 percent for its 35,000 clients in the last two months. Others have seen much more significant jumps: Spam black list maintainer Total Quality Management Cubed has seen a 450 percent increase in spam in two months, and the amount of spam filtered out every week by security software maker Sunbelt Software has more than tripled compared to six months ago.
While bulk e-mailers have, in the past, sent unwanted messages from a single server, increasingly the spam emanates from networks of compromised PCs, known as bot nets. The level of junk e-mail has increased almost in lock step with the number of compromised systems used for spam, said David Hart, the administrator for Total Quality Management.