Botnets Rustock and Grum Boost Spam Levels

Symantec Corp's branch MessageLabs, now known as Symantec Hosted Services, released a new report during the 1st week of March 2010. According to the report, spam contributed 89.4% of the total e-mail during February, a rise of 5.5% since January 2010.

Actually, a lot of this spam was on account of a 51% rise in spam operations of Grum botnet, said the report. Hence, the botnet was responsible for 25% of the total junk e-mails.

Another botnet that caused a rise in spam was Rustock bot. According to MessageLabs, the botnet revived on February 17, 2010 spewing massive pharmaceutical spam, which accelerated daily spam volume at the rate of 25%.

Paul Wood, Senior Analyst at MessageLabs Intelligence, states that the spammers certainly employed several botnets for the distribution of voluminous spam during February 2010. It is hardly matters whether they employed the botnets to conclude the spam campaign faster or discovered that it was effective enough, as reported by Money.cnn on March 1, 2010.

The security analyst further said that the malicious operations of the spam campaign was causing recent worldwide boost in spam percentages that in turn strongly influenced the worldwide spam volumes. On the basis of the latest spam trends, it could be said that more spam surges would occur in the near future, he added.

Together with the above findings, the report highlights that the volume of junk e-mails in Italy reached 93.4% during February 2010. The country thus became the biggest originator of spam. In the USA and Canada, spam levels accounted for 90.2% and 88% respectively, of all e-mails. In the UK, spam levels dropped to 88.6%. In Holland, they were at 91.2%, while in Australia they were at 89.5% and in Germany, at 91.3%.

During February 2010, the sector with the highest spam volume, at 93.1%, was the Engineering industry, said the report. The Education sector accounted for 90.8% of all e-mails; the Chemical & Pharmaceutical sector -89.3%; the IT Services sector -89.8%; Retail -91.1%; the Public Sector -87.6%, and Finance -88.4%.

Related article: Botnet Misuses Google Analytics

» SPAMfighter News - 3/9/2010