Do spammers work business hours only?

One of the frequent comments we get from our users is the apparent sudden increase in SPAM between 9 AM and 7 PM. Overnight, hardly anything comes through but during the daylight hours the spammers seem to get going along with the rest of us!

Yes, yes they do. But not in the way you would imagine.

Most SPAM today originates from workstations, office computers, home computers, etc. There are many studies on the Internet that put the level of systems compromised by a worm or a virus at 25%. That means that one in four computers in use is being abused to send junk mail.

When the workers get to the office and power on their systems, they also power on the SPAM amplifiers that hackers have turned those computers into. With more companies going green and mandating computer shutdowns outside of regular business hours, we see a bigger trend in the SPAM activity start and end times.

This also contributes to delays and deferrals during the business hours. Because networks lay practically dormant overnight, as the millions of computers (“spam zombies”) come online, the mail servers are hit with a huge load that is amplified further by all the “opt in, confirm your email” systems and so on. These tend to overload the mail servers and cause huge delays and disconnects all over the place.

This in part is why we only troubleshoot issues during business hours. After hours everything appears to run correctly because there is significantly less load placed on the network. However, those tasks during business hours can quickly identify a host that is overloaded and not taking any mail.