Google Sees Massive Spam Spike

According to Google product manager Sundar Raghavan, spam volume has skyrocketed this summer.  They have seen massive volume increases particularly for spoofed or “phishing” type of messages.

“Between July and August we have started to see a very interesting pattern in term of volume and sophistication of e-mail threats incoming,” Raghavan said. “Around July 20 we started seeing a spoofed UPS tracking e-mail messages going to users. On July 24 saw a peak of 10 million messages.”

Google isn’t concerned about its ability to scale for the massive increase in spam. However, for companies that try to go it alone, scaling might be viturally impossible.

According to Raghavan, Google doesn’t face a particular technological difficulty in fighting spam. He noted that Google is constantly expanding its heuristics capabilities to automatically detect spam. The other challenge is about meeting the scalability challenges that massive volumes of spam can cause.

“A lot of problems occur because when customers take on these challenges for themselves, whether it’s with an appliance or software, they are setting themselves up for scaling the infrastructure,” Raghavan said.

“At Google this is our bread and butter,” Raghavan said. “If there is one worry I have it’s not if Google can scale, it’s if community at large can scale.”

Read the entire article at InternetNews