After the closure of a number of botnets during the second half of last year, email spammers are beginning to regain their strength, according to figures from Kaspersky Lab.
Following the closure of the Pushdo/Cutwail botnet in August 2010 the level of spam coming out of the United States dropped dramatically, to around 1-1.5%, according to Kaspersky. Since then however it has been steadily climbing again and in February 2011 reached its highest point for four months, with 4.27%.
October last year also saw the takedown of the Bredolab botnet, which was said to have infected 30 million computers around the world.
Maria Namestnikova, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab reckons that the spammers are gaining strength once more and we will soon be seeing huge levels of spam again. "Spammers are gradually regaining their position following the closure of major botnets in the second half of last year, and we foresee a return to spam levels of 81-82% by April-May 2011," she said.
Kaspersky Lab’s February report on global spam activity also revealed two distinct variants of spam emails; those designed to just harvest email addresses to continue propagating and those meant to steal confidential data such as financial information. The security firm reckons that malicious files were found in 3.18% of all emails sent in February, a rise of 0.43% on the previous month.
India remained the main source of email spam during February, accounting for 8.83% of all global spam traffic. India was way ahead of Russia, which accounted for 4.26%, Brazil and Indonesia. South Korea climbed into the top five for the first time, Kaspersky revealed.
Recently it was revealed that the Rustock botnet had also been taken down. During 2010 it was the biggest source of spam on the Internet, with about 200 billion messages being attributed to it each day. Microsoft took much of the credit for shutting down Rustock.
