Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 10:02
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 3
Australia has dropped like a stone from its number one spot as the country receiving the most virus-infected emails to number 12 in the world, but our level of spam activity is still above the global average despite Australian spam activity decreasing by two percent this month.
There is, however, some good news on the botnet
front, with Symantec revealing in its latest MessageLabs intelligence
report that activity levels for one of the larget botnets globally –
Cutwail – fell in August by as much as 90 percent following the
shutdown of an ISP in Latvia.
Mind you, while we’ve had the demise of one botnet, unfortunately, as
Symantec reports, in August another prolific botnet called Donbot
continued to use shortened URLs in its spam runs, peaking at
distributing ten billion emails in just one day!
Symnatec’s report on Australia shows that while our position as number
one for receipt of virus-infected emails fell to number 12 – or from
one in 308.3 emails received throughout August compared to one in
153.1 in July – spam activity, despite the two percent drop, was at
90.6 percent of all emails in August, which is still above the global
average of 88 percent.
According to Symantec, the Latvian ISP Real Host was disconnected on 1
August after it was alleged to be linked to command-and-control servers
for infected botnet computers, particularly the Cutwail botnet which
the security firm says is responsible for approximately 15 to 20
percent of all spam today.
Symantec’s MessageLabs senior analyst, Paul Wood says that following
the disconnection, global spam volumes immediately fell by as much as
38 percent in the subsequent 48-hour period.
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