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Spam level reaches 75% in January

11 February 2009 14:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva â€“ APA-Economics. Global Internet spam levels rose 4.9 per cent in January this year since December 2008 to 74.6 per cent, according to the MessageLabs Intelligence Report. This is the proportion of e-mail that was blocked as spam by the tech firm’s e-mail protect services.
Levels were close to those experienced before Internet service provider McColo was taken down in November 2008, said MessageLabs, which is now part of Symantec. MessageLabs Intelligence is a source of data and analysis for messaging security issues, trends and statistics.
Among the top 10 botnets responsible for distributing spam, Mega-D (Ozdoc) had the highest throughput in January, sending more than 26 million spam e-mails per minute.
Cutwail (Pandex) remains the largest botnet with more than one million active IPs this month. Among the top 10 are some new players, including Xarvester, Donbot and Waledac.
"The potential of these botnets to spam in large volumes is a major concern," said Richard Bowman, regional manager of MessageLabs South Asia. "In particular, Waledac is believed to be the next generation of the infamous botnet Storm (Peacomm). While Waledac malware was spread at an alarming rate in January, it was dispersing spam in relatively small volumes. For now, the botnet controllers are clearly focusing on growing and developing this new botnet resource rather than using it to spam. It will be one to watch as 2009 progresses."