Bagle Replaces Rustock to Become the Greatest Generator of Spam

Symantec the security company through its MessageLabs hosted services unit released its monthly spam report namely "January 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report," according to which, Botnet Bagle overshadowed Botnet Rustock to become the greatest distributor of spam during January 2011.

Apparently, during the festival period, the Rustock operators paused briefly from dispatching pharma-related e-mail junk prior to resuming earlier in January 2011. And with that resumption on January 10, 2011, Rustock bridged the spam deficit owing to the break, and dispatched 17.5% of the entire e-mail junk that MessageLabs blocked during 2011. However, Bagle continued to push spam at a high rate of 1 message out of every 5 e-mails to contaminate the inter-webs, Symantec outlines.

Furthermore, according to Symantec, Rustock alone pushed 47.5% of the entire spam, with about 44.1bn messages daily, during peak-time.

Remarking about the report's discoveries, Senior Analyst Paul Wood for MessageLabs Intelligence at Symantec said that although Bagle wasn't new, it wasn't too active either during 2010. He added that during 2009, the botnet was designated as one of the 3 most active botents of the year, dispatching merely pharmaceutical spam. Theregister.co.uk published this on January 25, 2011.

The analyst further remarked that during the historical evolution of Rustock, the botnet at different time-periods frequently demonstrated uneven patterns of e-mailing junk via dispatching massive spam amounts prior to becoming dormant for a number of weeks over the periods. Itproportal.com published this on January 26, 2011.

Meanwhile, alongside Rustock, some more botnets, Xarvester and Lethic, which too dispatched spam, as well paused in their operations over the Christmas that resulted in an estimably larger amount of spam from Bagle, according to the report.

Still fascinating about the January spam scenario was that there was an alteration in fake pharmaceutical makes that Rustock promoted. Prior to malicious ISP Spamit's takedown during October 2010, the botnet practiced spam distribution on behalf of the notorious gang that perpetrated "Canadian Pharmacy."

Write MessageLabs researchers, the Rustock spam-botnet currently executes an operation namely "Pharmacy Express" as the most frequent pharma-related spam though its rate isn't same as before. Softpedia.com reported this on January 25, 2011.

Related article: Bagle Worm Spreads Unabatedly

» SPAMfighter News - 2/4/2011