Spammers Back to Business after McColo’s Closure

The data released by Postini, the e-mail security provider for Google, said that it took just a period of four months (November 20028-March 2009) for the spammers after the shutdown of the Califormia-based malware hosting company McColo Corp.

Postini noted that till the latter half of March 2009, seven-day average spam level was recorded at the similar level as it had been prior to McColo's shutdown. Moreover, the volume of spam during January-March 2009 increased at an average of 1.2% a day, which is the strongest growth rate since early 2008, whereas the spam level grew at a rate of nearly 1% a day during the same period last year, which was the record growth for the year.

Postini's Senior Product Marketing Manager, Adam Swidler, expressed his thoughts by saying that spammers should have reconstructed their botnets in this four-month period, as reported by cnet.com on March 31, 2009.

During the period, spammers might have resorted to old tricks such as links to malware hosting Websites, malicious payloads and e-mails exploiting the interest of the common public in current affairs in order to attract the bulk of user traffic.

Swidler further stated that presently, popular themes used to spread spam messages include the topics such as economy, mortgages, job cuts, refinancing and travelling. spammers are also trying out several other new ways; the most interesting being the location-based spam like e-mails advertising bogus news tailored to the location of the user.

As compared to February 2009, the volume of virus-infected e-mails increased by nine times in March 2009.

Also, it has been observed that spammers have reduced sending spam e-mails on Sundays, a day which was earlier very popular among them, as IT departments of the organizations perform systems' maintenance at the weekends, as per Swidler. Previously, spammers used to think that more e-mails would pass through at weekends.

It is noteworthy that about 70%-80% overnight decline was noticed in the spam levels on the shutdown of McColo on November 11, 2008. Investigations asserted that McColo was hosting control servers and commands that were used to bot the software planted on the majority of US-based computers.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 4/8/2009