Six bots deliver 85 percent of your spam
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Ever wondered where all your spam comes from? The Marshal TRACE team reckon they have found out, and the answer is pretty much a total of just six botnets. Indeed, Marshal reports that these six botnets account for the distribution of a staggering 85 percent of all spam at the moment.
The trouble is that the actual botnets doing most trade, and the actual botnets involved per se, tends to change on a regular basis which makes nuking them a lot harder than you might imagine. For example, just three weeks ago it was the Mega-D botnet that ruled the spamming scumbag roost with a 39 percent distribution share, this week it has ‘just’ 21 percent and the Srizbi botnet is king of the (crap) heap with that 39 percent figure. The fluctuation has a lot to do with the discovery and subsequent active protection against the malware which provides these botnets with their zombie PCs. In the case of Mega-D, for example, as soon as researchers discovered that the 35,000 strong botnet was being fed by the Ozdok malware and the control servers traced back the spam distribution hit zero.
“This week, Mega-D returned again to represent 21 per cent of spam after a 10-day period of inactivity. Owing to the break, Mega-D only accounted for an average of 11% of spam during February. At its peak last month, it was responsible for a third of all the spam we caught in our spam traps. While the recent publicity spooked the Mega-D spammers into taking their control servers offline, they have now clearly re-established themselves elsewhere,” said Bradley Anstis, Marshal VP of Products. “While Mega-D faltered, Srizbi emerged as the leading spam botnet in February. It is advanced and extremely stealthy malware. Lately, Srizbi has been particularly active in attempting to spread itself through spam campaigns using celebrities as lures,” added Anstis.
Strangely though, size isn’t everything in botnet land. Take the Storm botnet, the 85,000 zombie strong Storm botnet, which only manages to account for some three percent of the total spam distribution pool according to Marshal. “The size of a botnet, measured by how many bots it has, does not necessarily correlate with how much spam it sends. Our TRACE team has observed huge variations in the rate at which different spambots pump out spam,” said Anstis.
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