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High Spam Levels Continue In 2010
Mike Sachoff
Staff Writer
2010-01-25
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Spammers have launched new campaigns related to 2010 events to sustain the high levels of spam experienced toward the end of 2009, according to Symantec's latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report.
 | | High Spam Levels Continue In 2010 |  |
At the start of 2010, MessageLabs saw the typical special New Year offers for pharmaceuticals, fashion accessories and watches, weight loss products, loans and jobs. At its peak, spam related to the New Year accounted for 7.7 percent of all spam on a single day and more than 50 percent of the New Year related spam was sent by the Grum and Cutwail botnets combined.
With 83.4 percent of spam coming from botnets at the end of 2009, MessageLabs estimated the remainder of spam, 0.9 percent, originated from free webmail accounts. More than 79 percent of webmail spam came from three well-known free webmail service providers.
"Despite the best efforts of the webmail providers to prevent this abuse of their services, there is still a viable market in the underground economy for buying and selling legitimate and usable webmail accounts," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services.
In December 2009, MessageLabs began tracking a new botnet called Lethic, which quickly accounted for 2.5 percent of all spam. Within the first week of January, spam from Lethic increased to less than four percent of all spam and then peaked at 5.25 percent of all spam on January 8 before dropping off to nothing.
"Lethic seems to have disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived," Wood said. "The spam it had been sending was roughly an even mix of pharmaceutical and replica watch spam. Interestingly, the Bagle botnet was sending the exact same spam with the same hyperlinks as Lethic and over the same time period leading us to believe that Lethic possibly came from the same creators as Bagle or the people behind the spam may have hired the resources of more than one botnet gang to increase output."
About the Author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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