Commtouch Names 2006 ‘Year of the Zombies’

In this year's Spam Trends Report, Commtouch has called 2006 the 'Year of Zombies'. The report is based on an analysis of 2 billion messages spammed every week across the world.

Zombies are armies of computers under the remote control of spammers. In 2006 zombies spread to all corners of the world with nearly 8 million PCs sending out billions of junk e-mails every day.

The report said new sophisticated techniques of spamming superseded conventional anti-spam mechanisms, such as content filtering, heuristics, and IP address blacklisting. One of the more effective techniques is image-based spam, which is fairly difficult to detect compared to text-based spam. Commtouch estimated image spam to use up 70% of the bandwidth in 2006.

As pointed out by Commtouch President and CTO, Amir Lev 2006 saw bigger, faster and smarter out-breaks of spam. A large number of spammers have been cleverly innovating techniques that could evade common anti-spam software thereby developing massive zombie botnets. Outbreaks have been so fast and sophisticated that most anti-spam technologies found it hard to detect and defend against them.

This year spam averaged to 87% of total e-mail traffic, showing an increase by 30% over last year. There were varying spam rates for users and organizations. Small businesses experienced spam rates by only 45% while bigger e-mail providers got affected by high rates of 98%. Overall business e-mail boxes received a smaller proportion of spam than user accounts.

Commtouch Labs has estimated about 6-8 million active zombie IP addresses on a single day. There has been a constant circulation of compromised zombie machines. According to Commtouch estimates, about 500,000 new PCs are converted into zombie botnets every day. A standard botnet is capable of sending 160 million spam mails in only two hours.

The report says, zombie activity accounted for 85% of Internet spam. Multi-wave outbreaks of image spam swelled to 1.7 billion MB in a given day. EBay and PayPal were the prime targets of fraud, with 50% of phishing attacks using their names. Apart form Commtouch; IronPort Systems also reported a soaring 35% of spam in November 2006.

Related article: Commtouch Releases its Latest Report on Trends of E-Mail Threats

» SPAMfighter News - 1/2/2007