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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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