Rustock Revives As Largest Source of Spam

According to Mathew Nisbet a malware analyst and Matt Sergeant an anti-spam technologist of Symantec, Rustock appears to have resurrected on January 10, 2011 and is once again spewing the largest amount of spam worldwide. TG DAILY published this on January 12, 2011.

On January 10, 2011, the total e-mail junk was twofold the amount of January 9, 2011.

Notes Nisbet through a blog post, during Christmas, the Rustock became dormant and the reason for this isn't known but what's established is that there has been a massive fall in worldwide spam because of the botnet's inactivity. Infosecurity.com reported this on January 11, 2011.

Explained MessageLabs senior intelligence analyst Paul Wood for Symantec Hosted Services, three botnets namely Rustock, Lethic and Xarvester that sent out spam stopped doing the act alternatively sent very low amounts. EWeek published this on January 11, 2011. Wood further explained that Rustock was the lone botnet of the biggest size having 1.1-1.7m bot-infected PCs worldwide. When 2010 came to an end, Rustock had already sent a high 47.5% of the total e-mail junk. Lethic and Xarvester were comparatively minuter in size and responsible for not even 0.5% of the total junk e-mails each, he added.

Evidently, according to Wood, nothing suggested that any action or law enforcement had disrupted the above botnets in any manner as also bot-herders isolated Rustock bot-infected PCs from the main botnet. Rather, it was evident that those PCs continued to be vibrant in activities like click-fraud, Wood stated.

Nevertheless, from the middle of January 9, 2011 night, Rustock is again doing its activities and seems ready to carry on from the point it halted its operations on December 25, 2010 when it generated the maximum global spam. Undoubtedly, according to the Symantec security experts, since Rustock has currently revived, the overall e-mail junk is once again high.

Says Nisbet, it cannot be said anything about the effect of this revival on worldwide junk e-mail at this juncture alternatively whether Rustock is set to become permanent; however, one thing is sure i.e., with vacation over, spammers are back to their routine activity.

Related article: Rustock Become The World’s Largest Spam Botnet

» SPAMfighter News - 1/22/2011