The Spam Cryer

Are you ready to see your spam volume Jump 10 times?

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January 26th, 2009

It took less than 3 months for the Spammers to ramp up their production to 90% of where it was pre-McColo takedown in November 2008 according to a number of reports and graphs available online.

The first report is from Message Labs and it reports that with spam volume up another 5% so far in January 2009 the top 10 Botnets, while consisting of between 10 thousand to 1 Million bots (estimated), were capable of sending out between 131 Million to almost 40 BILLION Spam messages PER DAY per Botnet. Total Volume from just the top 10 Botnets totalled almost 65 Billion messages per day! Are you getting your fair share?

It is interesting to see that the largest Botnet Cutwail/Pandex placed second behind Mega-D/Ozdok in spam volume per day category (7 Billion to 38 Billion) even though it had more compromised PC’s (1 Million bots to 660,000). This is double interesting as the latest estimates for the recent Conflicker/Downadup botnet size is at 10 million PC’s and they are not sending any spam yet.  With 10 million bots and assuming an aggressive and efficient spam engine Conflicker/Downadup could be capable of sending over half a Trillion (575 Million) messages per day by itself. Are you ready to see your spam volume jump to 10 times its current volume or even higher?

According to Barracuda Central Pharmacy spam still leads with almost 50% of the total volume while Gambling, Illegal Advertizing, ‘Amazing Deals on Software’ and ‘Genuine Replica’s’ round out the top 5 spots and over 90% of the total volume of spam.

If you don’t know how effective your anti-spam measures are or how close they are to running at capacity (out of sight = out of mind) then now is the time to take a serious look at these solutions in your organization and how they are going to handle the new surge of spam that is waiting on the horizon.

It might just be time to invest in a new firewall solution and anti-spam solution.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Other Graphs and reports.

MessageLabs Intelligence: January 2009
http://www.messagelabs.com/mlireport/MLIReport_2009.01_Jan_Final.pdf

Conficker botnet at 10m infections
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/conficker_botnet/

DCC e-mail and spam volume graph last 12 months.
http://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/graphs/

SpamCop – last 12 months spam volume.
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamyear

Barracuda Central – Spam data last 24 hours
http://www.barracudacentral.org/data/spam

Shaun Sturby

Entry Filed under: Anti-Spam, Barracuda Networks, Botnets, Bulletins, CudaMail, Spam Firewall