Botnets revived, spam back to prior level
Spam levels could take an upwards spike after researchers detected a malicious network of computers designed to push out junk mail and malware was brought back to life Tuesday. The Srizbi botnet, comprising more than half a million PCs, was deemed responsible for approximately 40 to 50 percent of the world’s spam. Up until recently, security experts believe that Srizbi was completely defunct after botnet was knocked offline two weeks ago as part of a collaborative effort within the security community. Now that Szribi is partially revived, it is anticipated to spew out malicious content at alarming rates, experts say.
According to MessageLabs, now part of Symantec, the spike in spam levels was only at 37 percent of what they were before Internet Service Provider McColo was disconnected from upstream provider Hurricane Electric, who disassociated with the provider because of its connection to some of the world’s largest malicious botnets. McColo’s shut down came shortly after the release of a scathing report by a group of notable security researchers and vendors lambasting McColo for hosting numerous Web sites known to cater to child pornography and malware. Spam levels experienced a sharp drop — anywhere from 60 to 80 percent– in the weeks following McColo’s takedown. However experts say that spam levels are steadily returning to “normal” levels, rising to two thirds of what they were before the McColo shut down as the spammer reconnected with other providers.
Source: CRN
Comments(9)
First……to spam
!the link rlslog hid from the main category:
http://www.rlslog.net/zero-an-investigation-into-9-11-2008-dvdrip-xvid-repack-sosiso/
The news tidbit is actually not true… The botnet did reactivate but has been shut down again. Their new C&C center is off the net, and the backups as well. The relocation which included the replacement of the primary binary on the zombies revealed how this is done. Now the botnet can be wiped out as it’s trivial to take over and tell the zombies to download a worthless binary that effectively will disable the zombie permanently – at least until the stupid user gets his or her machine infected again…
losers w/ nothing to do are back in action. yay?
I run 3 anti-spam servers and have seen a whopping drop in spam, so much so that (even after reading that I should expect a sharp drop) I had to investigate that the servers were still accepting proper connections, hitting it withe DoD attacks to make sure it wasn’t falling over.
From rejecting 3 millions emails a month to only 1 million.
yeah, i posted in the other article a couple of days ago that they were back up, which they were to some extent, but it didn’t last long, probably only a few hours.
somebody should write something that will override the infected computers trojan and make it pop up messages ever 5 minutes saying “you are infected, you stupid %$*^, now GET IT FIXED!”
lol
Similar scenario, our spam per day dropped from 10,000+ to just a few hundred and at 1st I thought something was wrong.
Well, I just checked out our statistics, and yes, there is small increase just after monday. But NOHING like before MoloCo shutdown.
Statistics of one year of our spamtrap: http://i36.tinypic.com/egbdvr.png
And statistics for last week in same host:
http://i37.tinypic.com/kakd2v.png
Btw, host is located in Finland, so I think it could be way different conclusions in somewhere else.
These people should all be rapped by aids-ridden crack heads.