New spam botnet leaves Storm for dead

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by Stephen Withers

Friday, 01 February 2008

! Storm's place as the leading spam generator has been taken by Mega-D, a botnet currently being used to peddle 'male enhancement' pills. Related stories An Inconvenient Truth: Spam Sells Lots of Sex and Drugs Symantec swallows promising Australian security middleweight 5 million fake news spams per hour What is the speed of spam? 7.8 billion messages per hour! Rustock takes spambot gold with Olympic surge According to content security vendor Marshal, Mega-D currently accounts for 32 percent of all spam in circulation. At its peak, Storm was only responsible for 20 percent of the world's spam, and is now running at around one-tenth of that. "It is hard to say with any degree of certainty why the Storm botnet has declined," said Bradley Anstis, Marshal's vice president of products. "Just two weeks ago we saw a renewed campaign to distribute the Storm malware under the guise of a love letter. "Perhaps Storm has become a victim of its own success as Microsoft has been targeting Storm with its Malicious Software Removal Tool since September last year," he added. "Microsoft claims they have cleaned approximately 200,000 computers per month since then. If that is accurate, it must be a key reason for the decline of Storm." According to Marshal, more than 70 percent of spam is generated by five botnets. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Email  Microsoft  Spam  Stephen Withers  Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now

 

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