Spam On The Rise Again

Posted by Tanya Hall

November 27, 2008

Two weeks ago web hosting firm McColo was shut down, resulting in a whopping two-thirds drop in worldwide spam. Unfortunately the holiday seems to be over, with spam levels on the rise again and on target to reach prior high levels.

McColo acted as host to a large number of “command and control” centres for botnets that send spam and engage in other malicious activities. When it was shutdown, these botnets were left without a centralised command, and botnet owners have been on the hunt for new hosts and bandwidth.

Some 450,000 infected computers have been spotted trying to connect to the largest of the networks McColo hosted according to Internet security firm FireEye. It has spotted these infected computers from the Srizbi botnet which is alleged to account for as much as half of all the spam in the world, trying to “phone home” and reach their command and control servers.

Christmas is all about giving, and that’s unfortunately true of spammers who typically increase spam levels around this season. This, combined with the recent surge on spam messages, means that the annoyance of spam will soon return to its former spicy strengths.

Source: BBC News

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