5 million fake news spams per hour

Stephen Withers
Monday, 18 August 2008 05:24

Your IT - Home IT

The volume of fake messages involved underscores the effectiveness of botnets when it comes to pumping out large volumes of spam. But 5 million per hour is far from a record: security provider Marshal recently claimed the 315,000+ system Srizbi botnet is capable of generating 7.8 billion spams per hour.

Srizbi generates around half of all spam, and adding the Rustock and Mega-D botnets accounts for 75 percent of the total.

So what's to be done?

If you haven't subscribed to a web site's alert service, don't open emails that purport to be such alerts. If you have subscribed, think twice before clicking on the links. The safest approach is probably to open the real site's home page in your browser and then navigate to the story of interest - if it's actually there!

In the longer term, a decent spam filter (either running on your computer, your mail provider's server, or a third-party filtering service) should reduce the amount of spam that reaches you.

And keeping your security software up to date should reduce the risk of malware getting onto your system, but take care of yourself by treating links in emails with scepticism rather than relying on technological measures.