Srizbi sending half the world's spam

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 08 May 2008 11:27

Security

The Srizbi botnet is responsible for half of all spam, according a content security company.

"Srizbi is the single greatest spam threat we have ever seen," said Bradley Anstis, Marshal's vice president of products.

"At its peak, the highly publicized Storm botnet only accounted for 20 percent of spam. Srizbi now produces more spam than all the other botnets combined," he explained.

While Srizbi isn't the largest botnet - that 'honour' appears to go to Kraken - its 300,000-plus zombies are pouring out huge quantities of messages pushing a variety of products as well as spreading itself to more computers.

"Microsoft recently announced its success combating the Storm botnet with their Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT). The challenge now is for the security industry to collectively turn its sights on Srizbi and the other major botnets. We look forward to seeing Microsoft target Srizbi with MSRT in the near future," said Anstis.

Marshal's league table of spam producing countries currently shows the United States, Turkey, China and Russia as the four worst nations. That said, Europe is the source of more spam than any other continent, producing significantly more than Asia and more than twice as much as North America.