Microsoft’s Push Back Against Spammers

It’s fashionable to beat up Microsoft as the gang that can’t shoot straight. The willingness of the press and individuals alike to fall for the “IE users are dumb” scam is a great example of this.

Over the years, I’ve seen Microsoft go from doing some things very badly to very well. One of those examples is its crackdown on spammers and malware. Case in point: taking down the Rustock gang. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, in cooperation with law enforcement, researchers and other industry experts, took down a world-wide botnet that infected a million machines and sent out billions of e-mails per day.

In speaking with Microsoft at Black Hat last week, I asked them if they will bring the lessons learned from taking down Rustock and Waledac to bear on other botnets. The strategy, as explained to me, was to look for traits and vulnerabilities in a botnet that offer a point of attack. Naturally, he did not divulge details.

Another area where they have tightened things up is in securing Hotmail. A few years ago, Hotmail had a well-deserved reputation for being a spammer’s haven. To address the problem, Microsoft launched the SmartScreen program to stop spam within the network. Back when it was announced in 2010, Microsoft noted it was receiving eight billion letters per day but delivering only 2.5 billion. So right off the top, Microsoft was stopping 5.5 billion spam messages per day.

In a progress update, Hotmail’s Group Program Manager Dick Craddock said the company has cut spam in Hotmail inboxes by 90 percent from its peak (and down 40 percent year-over-year from 2010 levels alone) and Microsoft has reduced spam on the Internet by 15 percent from its peak simply by cleaning up Hotmail. He also said that as Microsoft has made it harder for spammers to use Hotmail to send spam, “outbound spam” from Hotmail has been cut by 75 percent.

There was no silver bullet. Microsoft has used a multitude of weapons against the spammers, including connection-time filtering, content filtering, blocklist and safelist preferences, and more. Craddock outlines them all in his blog post.

I’ve shunned Hotmail for some time because it was so bad. It was a nuisance in general. At a prior job, I got so much harassing mail from Hotmail (and nothing valid) I ended up blocking the whole domain. So I would like to hear from Hotmail users in the feedback section below. Is your Inbox cleaner? Has Microsoft delivered?