Spam News

Rustock botnet leads spam surge up 60 percent in 2009

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Spammers have now completely recovered the capacity lost last November by the shutdown of the botnet-hosting ISP McColo and spam levels reached 90 percent of all email in the first half of 2009, according to the latest spam report from web security firm Marshal8e6.

From January to June 2009, spam email surged by 60 percent, with 40 percent of spam coming from the Rustock botnet of compromised PCs, the report said.

Bradley Anstis, director of technology strategy at Marshal8e6, said Rustock has specialized in image spam and spoofing HTML templates from legitimate newsletters and inserts to lend spam the appearance of professional, legitimate email. Image spam spiked to account for 10 percent of all spam, he said.

Other spam trends observed by the firm include the predominance of pharmaceutical spam, which now makes up 75 percent of junk email, and the use of spam messages on social networking sites including Twitter to spread malware.

Legitimate websites being compromised by hackers and serving up spam to unsuspecting visitors represents a growing threat, according to the report. Roughly 70 percent of sites hosting malicious content are legitimate sites that have been hacked.

"Web browsers are categorically one of the most dangerous applications on a user's computer," Anstis said.