MessageLabs Revealed Striking Spam Related Facts

Security firm MessageLabs has come up with its latest issue of monthly intelligence report. The report unveils some interesting findings of spam evolving from Linux systems.

Senior Analyst for Symantec Hosted Services, Paul Wood, stated that the most usual view has been that Windows machines are held responsible for most of the spam given the large number of infections, as per the news published by v3.co.uk on April 27, 2010.

Also, Wood explained that unsurprisingly almost 90% of spam originates from Windows systems. However, as far as Linux is concerned, it has just 1% market share, but is held responsible for almost 5% of spam volume. So, the probability of getting spam from Linux is higher than a Windows system.

Further, the report states that Windows is still the most lucrative target for hackers. But, the firm said that Linux systems are also susceptible, probably through drive-by attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in browser plug-ins, as per the news published by conceivablytech.com on April 27, 2010.

Besides the above discovery, another fascinating finding in the report is that Cutwail botnet lost to Rustock botnet as far as quantity of spam it relays and the number of active bots it operates are considered. On one hand, Rustock has decreased the individual bots' output by 65% and on the other hand, it has raised the amount of bots in operation by 300%, compensating for the reduced output.

Further, Cutwail has decreased in size, from 2 Million bots in May 2009 to 600,000 bots. Cutwail is currently held responsible for just 4% of total spam. The report states that Rustock is the biggest spam-relaying botnet, accountable for 32.8% of overall spam.

Wood claimed that Cutwail was affected by the shutdown of ISP Real Host in August 2009. This leads to Cutwail losing the capability to update its bots, causing them to decrease heavily in numbers without the knack to recover. Consequently, Rustock took over the spamming market with major volumes from hackers by undercutting the market with huge capacity and minimal operational costs, as per the news by marketwatch.com on April 27, 2010.

Related article: Mozilla Rules Out Bug in Its Firefox

» SPAMfighter News - 5/8/2010