The bots at the heart of Spam

The button with an emblem of an antispam on the keyboard.My colleagues, at MessageLabs, are reporting that 83% of all Spam messages are sent from botnet infected systems.  It has long understood that one of many uses for botnets is for an infected PC to become a spam relay. The information from MessageLabs is interesting in that it provides data to finally start to size the issue. They also went onto identify the botnets that are responsible for the spam itself. The Cutwail botnet is by far and the biggest culprit, accounting for 45% of all botnet spam, with others like Mega-D, Xarvester, Donbot, Grum, and Rustock making up much of the difference.
  
One other interesting update, contained in the report from MessageLabs, was that Instant Messaging (IM) continues to carry an increasing number of embedded links, that in turn, then lead people to compromised web sites that are then hosting malware. At the end of 2008, MessageLabs Intelligence research indicated that 1 in 200 (0.50%) hyperlinks shared over public instant messaging (IM) applications were identified as malicious, i.e. the website harbored some form of malware designed to perform a drive-by attack on a vulnerable web browser or browser plug-in. In June, the same research was conducted again and highlighted that the threat has increased to 1 in 78 (1.28%) were linked to websites that hosted malicious content.

June 30, 2009 | Filed Under Security, Spam 

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