Dramatic drop in virus-infected emails hitting Australia

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 09:02

Business IT - Security

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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