Has GDPR Contributed To Spam Decline? 2 Organisations Say It’s Too Early To Tell

Recently threat intelligence organisation Recorded Future published a blog post suggesting “spammers are not — at least at this time — rushing to launch new campaigns because of GDPR-enforced WHOIS privacy rules.”

The General Data Protection Regulation that came into force on 25 May, seeks to give individuals more control over their personal data and to simplify data protection regulation in the European Union to one rule for all countries. Recorded Future published spam volumes compiled by Cisco which found that “on May 1, 2018, the total volume of email was 433.9 billion messages; spam accounted for 370.04 billion messages, or 85.28 percent of all email. On August 1, 2018, the total volume of messages was 361.83 billion, with 85.14 percent, or 308.05 billion messages, identified as spam. While the total volume of email fell precipitously, most likely due to a combination of seasonal email fluctuations and as the result of newly enforced privacy standards, the percentage of spam remained roughly the same.”

Recorded Future surmised that “spammers are not — at least at this time — rushing to launch new campaigns because of GDPR-enforced WHOIS privacy rules. Spam is still a big problem, but it has not become a bigger problem, contrary to popular opinions among security researchers.”

Spamhaus has taken a similar view. They note “the real answer is that it is far too early to tell.”

“Before GDPR came into effect, records such as a domain’s registered owner and registered contacts could be looked up in WHOIS databases maintained by individual registrars governed by ICANN.”

“WHOIS information was used by researchers in organisations such as Spamhaus to help determine a domain’s reputation. Domains determined from this and other factors to have a bad reputation would have potentially been listed on our Domain Block List (DBL).”

Spamhaus goes on to note that “whilst the lack of some of this information is tiresome and makes a security researcher’s job a little more difficult, it isn’t insurmountable. Spam will be blocked. Domains will continue to be added to our DBL and email will be filtered accordingly.”

“It’s true, spam rates have dropped marginally since May 2018. Spamhaus never anticipated a tsunami of spam to follow GDPR, however current claims that spam has fallen as a result of GDPR are unconvincing.

“Of course, it could be that legitimate companies, who are concerned about being GDPR compliant, have started purging email lists and are sending less ‘legit’ spam. However, one needs to remember that spam from legitimate companies accounts for a very small percentage of overall spam numbers, so any reduction in this area would have a minute impact on the figures.

“Another theory could be that due to the changes on WHOIS fewer bad domains are being identified and therefore some anti-spam systems are flagging less email.

“Nonetheless, this small reduction in spam is more than likely down to the natural ebb and flow of spam volumes, which have always been highly variable, just like botnet traffic.”

Spamhaus note there could be “numerous non-GDPR related reasons as to why there’s been a recent drop in spam email ranging from the spambots which are currently in operation (or not in operation as the case may be) to who has been arrested recently!”

So Spamhaus say there’s “no hard evidence we have seen proving that this current decline in spam is as a direct result of GDPR…it will be interesting to see what the volumes of spam are like over Black Friday and the subsequent Christmas holidays.”

They also suggest the drop in spam levels bein attributed to the GDPR is a “vacuous claim, unless it’s worth considering that snowshoe spammers don’t need as many new identities now that their current ones are withheld on WHOIS.”

“A more likely explanation to the drop in domain name registrations could be something as simple as top-level domains (TLDs) not having run any ‘specials’ recently (everyone loves a bargain, even a cybercriminal).”

But Spamhaus suggests that prohibiting personal details being visible on Whois “will hamper, if not stop, organisations being able to join the dots and identify gangs of professional cybercriminals who have a mechanism of fraud that is proving successful.”

According to Spamhaus “researchers collect all kinds of information from WHOIS. This data allows us to identify patterns in spamming activity, and build intelligence to attribute it to specific spam gangs.”

Whois data are “small but critical pieces of data [that] can become crucial to investigations later down the line, although they may not be obvious at the time. This evidence can assist law enforcement agencies to pursue these prolific gangs who are defrauding significant amounts of people of vast quantities of money” with “even fraudulent information that is used in a WHOIS record can be used against criminals.”

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