Death, Taxes and Botnets
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spam, Security, email, Internet on
If Benjamin Franklin were alive today I’m pretty sure he would amend his famous “…in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” line to include botnets. Every single day, some 150 billion spam messages are distributed by botnets and, like death and taxes, no matter how hard we try nothing seems to be able to prevent botnet growth. Well, almost nothing.
With botnets now being responsible for some 88% of all global spam by volume, and the computers of those unsuspecting folk which contribute to the botnet collectives being at risk of an assortment of auxiliary security and privacy compromises, something has to be done. That much is obvious. According to the latest Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence Report, that something has been the closure of hosting outfits that it describes as ‘rogue Internet Service Providers’ such as McColo, PriceWert and Real Host. These closures came after a four month investigation by the Washington Post which forced the suppliers of their connectivity to take action.
At the time of the McColo takedown, late in 2008, the impact was felt almost immediately. IT Pro reported how during the first 12 hours following the pulling of the plug, spam volumes dropped by as much as 70%, and how those spam volumes remained low for a few weeks. However, within a month security researchers were seeing a steady climb in spam activity as the botnets found new homes for their command and control centres. By the start of this year, Mega-D had come back from the dead and was responsible for around half of all the spam flowing through security honeypots. Other botnet brands, if you can call them that, such as Cutwail and Srizbi have also hit that 50% figure at their peak.
But, as the new Symantec MessageLabs report reveals, botnet trends come and go like the seasons. Srizbi has vanished from the spamming scene entirely it would appear, and Mega-D has been shrinking in size so rapidly that it is now only one tenth as big as it was in June in terms of compromised computers. That does not mean that Mega-D is no longer a player, of course, in fact it is putting the bots it does have left to work at a far harder pace and is churning out spam at a rate per minute that can only be beaten by a relative newcomer called Bobax. depending on your point of view Bobax either sounds like a cuddly teddy bear or a nasty disease. I favour the latter, especially when the spam output per compromised computer is claimed to be the highest that MessageLabs has ever seen. Currently, Bobax is responsible for some 15.7% of all global spam by volume. That still falls short of another new name, Grum, which is apparently churning out 23% of global spam right now, having ramped up the output per bot significantly since the summer.
The largest botnet if measured by the number of compromised computers under its direct control would have to be Rustock, claiming anything up to 1.9 such PCs. In sheer botnet size terms it has grown to double what it was at the start of the summer. Yet in terms of actual spam output it is struggling against the competition. Researchers insist that what sets Rustock apart from the rest is the ‘highly automated cycle of spamming activity’ it displays, with spam output accelerating from 8am (GMT) and peaking at noon. The newest of the major botnets to watch is Maazben, a casino only spammer at the moment but one which is growing at a rapid rate (up from 0.5% of global spam to 1.4% in just a few weeks) recently without increasing the spam output. This suggests it could be getting ready for a move into other spamming markets soon.
“Over the past year, we have seen a number of ISP’s taken offline for hosting botnet activity resulting in a case of sink or swim and an ensuing shift in botnet power,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec. “This has undermined the power of the more dominant botnets like Cutwail and cleared the way for new botnets like Maazben to emerge. However, this won’t always be the case as botnet technology has also evolved since the end of 2008 and the most recent ISP closures now have less of an impact on resulting activity as downtime now only lasts a few hours rather than weeks or months as before.”
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
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