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Spam Level During 2010 Reached 89.1% States Symantec

Symantec, the IT security company, declared its MessageLabs Intelligence 2010 Security Report on December 7, 2010 according to which, during 2010, the yearly mean worldwide spam accounted for 89.1% of the total e-mail, exhibiting a growth of 1.4% from 2009.

Moreover, during August 2010, the worldwide e-mail junk climbed a maximum of 92.2% with botnet-driven spam increasing to 95% when a fresh Rustock botnet was put into force as well as used, Symantec reports.

The company also reports that during the greater part of 2010, botnet-driven spam was responsible for 88.2% of the total spam; however, with the year drawing to a close, that rate has fallen to 77% since spam associate Spamit was shut down during early October 2010. What's more, with the year drawing to a close, there is about an identical number of working zombies as that during 2009-end.

Symantec estimates that there are about 3.5 million to 5.4 million botnets across the globe.

Also, there hasn't been much change in the 3 most prevalent botnets sending spam in spite of the turmoil that occurred within the world of cyber-criminals like arrests of Zeus suspects, shutdown of botnets etc. between July and December 2010. Notably, Rustock continues to be the supreme among botnets, pushing spam twofold during the current year (2010) to spew 44bn junk e-mails daily. Understandably, it accumulated no less than 1m zombie computers, while the 2nd and 3rd biggest botnets have been Grum and Cutwail separately.

Meanwhile, according to a prediction by MessageLabs, botnets that are so nefarious today may employ a few fresh tricks during 2011.

States the report, botnet operators during 2011 may control their zombie machines by applying stenography techniques. This implies that these operators will conceal their instructions within simple viewing, probably inside music or graphic files spread via social networks or file sharing platforms. As a result, they will be able to clandestinely give commands to their bot-infected networks devoid of taking assistance from any Internet Service Provider for their infrastructure's hosting thereby helping them to evade detection better, the report analyzes. PCWorld.com reported this on December 7, 2010.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

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