According to Cochrane, the amount of spam he has received over the past month has been about 30 times higher than the same period last year, despite his use of layered filtering at the ISP level on the computer.
“Looking back at my pre-filtered messages, it became obvious that the number of attacks had accelerated over the past 12 months. And while my filters had held up well, my lack of diligence had allowed the number getting through to rise steadily”, he says in his latest blog posting.
“Roughly speaking, the spam level this past month has been around 30 times that of 2010. How come? Political tensions worldwide, wars, civil unrest, increases in criminal activity and more”, he adds.
Cochrane also suspects that the darker side of the internet has been encouraged by its increasing success and the rising number of positive hits that spam is producing.
“I know a lot of people have no spam filters, and some have no idea about the risks involved. My advice to them is to educate themselves or seek help, and get on the case fast. To everyone else my advice is to divert more power to your shields. The situation can only get worse”, he observes.
There is, however, one option, he says, and that is to move your email into a cloud environment, as taking this approach allows users to get the protection of the `big players' around them.
But, he says, it's important to treat this protection as an added layer and not to dismantle or let go of what you already have. Good security, he adds, is like thermal insulation.
“It's about layers - it really is”, he concludes.
Cochrane's advice is interesting, as whilst a number of email cloud services such as Gmail focus their attentions on getting users to log in using a web interface, they also offer IMAP, POP-3 and SMTP facilities, Infosecurity notes.
Put simply, whilst your email is stored in the cloud – and de-spammed by the cloud platform – you can still use Thunderbird or Outlook to draw down the messages and apply your usual spam plus malware filters. You'll need to check your spam bucket daily, but Cochrane's approach could save you a lot of time hitting the delete button.