Researchers have made a huge dent in a major variant of the Pushdo botnet, virtually crippling the network by working with hosting providers to take down about two thirds of the command-and-control servers involved in the botnet.
Consumers Don’t Relate Bot Infections to Risky Behavior As Millions Continue to Click on Spam
Latest reports have spam accounting for more than 95 percent of all email messages. You can thank botnets for most of that. Here’s what we’re up against.
In part 1 of my series, I looked at which botnet sends the most spam, by total number of messages sent at the recipient level and not the envelope level. In part 2, I looked at which one sends the most spam by total amount of bytes that they emit.
There are a couple of ways to measure which botnet sends the most spam. On the one hand, botnets can send 1 spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients, thus putting the cost of delivery heavily onto the recipient.
Around the Internet, and even on this blog, various analyses have been done on botnets and which one is responsible for sending the most spam. Whether it’s Rustock, Cutwail, or one of the new kids on the block (grum, gheg, or donbot), I don’t really see any consensus on which one is the spammiest.
Malware called Tigger/Syzor which is a safe mode rootkit password stealing Trojan that targets day traders.
The Internet Storm Center is reporting that several AV vendors have confirmed that the recently patch IE 7 vulnerability (MS-09-002 Uninitialized Memory Corruption) has been reverse engineered by the malware writers (so quickly!)
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.
Lance Atkinson, a prolific spammer since 2005 as part of ‘HerbalKing’ the
‘#1 worst spam gang of 2007, 2008′ according to the Spamhaus ROSKO list has been fined only $92,715 AUS (about $63,400 USD) by authorities because, according to Justice Christine French of the High Court in Christchurch, of the co-operation and candor of Lance in the early stages of the investigation.
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Technical Services Manager, and Optrics' point person for email security |
| Shaun Sturby, MCSE | |
