Spam back on the menu as botnet creating email triples in one week

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 15:26

Business IT - Security

The resulting website victims are taken to is a clone of Classmates.com, and instructs them to run a Flash video player which is, of course, the executable nasty instead.

"This kind of social engineering tactic is nothing new," said Hay. "What is significant is the rapid increase in the volume. It once again demonstrates the incredible power and dominance that the major spamming botnets have over email traffic. Very few legitimate businesses could triple their email capacity at the push of a button.  But this is the advantage that the illegal control of thousands of computers gives the spammers."

There is little doubting, then, that Srizbi is one of the biggest threats to Internet users today.

"We are trying to work with other security researchers to raise the profile of Srizbi and the threat it represents" Hay told us, adding "in contrast, the Storm botnet receives more research and media attention yet its impact is now bordering on insignificant."

With Srizbi accounting for distributing some 46 percent of all the spam that flows through the TRACE labs, let's hope the campaign is successful.