Rustock botnet responsible for 41% of all spam

Matthew DeCarlo

Posts: 5,271   +104

Botnets are now responsible for 95% of all spam, up from 84% in April, and nearly half of it comes from only one botnet according to Symantec. A whopping 41% of the Internet's spam is attributed to Rustock, which infects around 1.3 million computers. That number has decreased from 2.5 million machines in April, but the volume of spam it outputs has actually risen.

Rustock stopped using TLS, an encryption protocol, thus decreasing overhead and maximizing throughput. The controllers seem to have concluded that TLS gave them little or no discernible benefits and instead impeded their sending capacity. The botnet currently sends some 46 billion spam emails per day, which is up from about 43 billion when it had control of twice as many computers.

Overall, the global ratio of spam in email traffic this month increased 3.3% to 92.2%, or 1 in 1.08 messages. Hungary is the most spammed country at 96.3%. One out of every 327.6 emails carries a virus, and one out of 363.1 is a phishing attack. Interestingly, the automotive industry was the most spammed sector with a spam rate of 94.8%. You can read the full 15-page report here (PDF).

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It will never stop amazing me that people have this need to p*ss everyone off and create stuff like this. It saddens me more that people actually fool for some of these scams :(
 
What still surprises me is that they can identify the botnet by infection, I suppose, but there's no removing it. I do wonder why they can't block the traffic through some Spam definitions or use the same security exploits which the infection used to get on the computer's in order to repair the computer and kill the botnet.
 
It probably wouldn't be hard to shut this botnet down but there may not be a legal way to do it without having some law enforcement agency go after it. It's just not a high priority as far as I can tell. They'd rather go after file sharers.
 
Does anybody really not know that, "you order is ready", is spam, or for that matter, "Extends" doesn't work?

(Well, except for Yahoo).
 
Every bit of spam that I get gets reported to spam@uce.gov. I doubt it does any good, but at least I feel that I'm doing my part to eliminate this crap.
 
Given the state of technology today, about the only thing that might work would be licensing EVERY computer and imposing an ID telltale on EVERY email message sent. Not that I'm advocating it but when authorities are up against a wall, they fight back with whatever they can think of at the moment. It will be bloody...and so-long free internet. It didn't take us long to really botch it up.
 
heh my nad downloaded some malware from a spam email that made it say ''infected file u need buy this for $120, pay here'' when she clicked start. Thank god for malware bytes and Safe mode. (could not do anything, even my computer would not open!)
 
How does it do it so invisibly to the user whose computer is infected? Does it use IIS or mailto or something? Why doesn't windows prevent this function from being capable?
 
Corporate SNAFU;
How does it do it so invisibly to the user whose computer is infected? Does it use IIS or mailto or something? Why doesn't windows prevent this function from being capable?
OK, M$ Russia writes the malware, then lets M$ North American get blamed for not doing anything about it.
 
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