You have been photographed naked: you are being sued; you have a tax refund coming.

Stuart Corner
Monday, 21 April 2008 07:04

Business IT - Security

According to Bradley Anstis, vice president of products at Marshal, the Srizbi botnet is now the largest spam-sending botnet on the Internet, responsible for 45 percent of all spam caught by its TRACE Team. Marshal estimates it comprises 315,000 PCs and is responsible for an estimated 60 billion spam messages per day.

"In December last year, we attributed 20 percent of the spam we caught to Srizbi and now it is more than double that. It is also more than double the next biggest botnet in terms of its spam volume. We have observed individual Srizbi bots sending as much as 8,000 spam messages per hour," said Anstis.
 
He added: "The Storm botnet still garners the lion's share of the media's attention and it was certainly a major pioneer in botnet development, but today it is responsible for just one percent of spam. The biggest lesson that Storm taught spammers was the power of simple social engineering as a means of infecting computers and propagating their botnet. The simplest tricks are the best and this new one certainly fits the criteria."