From Ars technica:
Security firm Marshal estimates that six botnets account for 85 percent of the total spam sent world-wide. Srizbi is currently in the lead, with 39 percent of the “market,” followed by Rustock at 20 percent, Mega-D at 11 percent, Hacktool.Spammer at seven percent, Pushdo (6 percent), and Storm (two percent).
These numbers track the amount of spam each botnet is producing rather than the total number of systems infected by each botnet.
From The Register:
Spammers have broken captcha at Gmail with a 20% success record. With Gmail an unlikely domain to be blacklisted, spammers have gained a powerful, free and incredibly annoying new weapon with which to spread their penis enhancement and re-fi mortgage offers (one of which I did recently…not from a email, so save the hate mail….I’ll leave you in the dark as to which).
The spammers are believed to be the same ones that broke MSN’s Live captcha a few weeks ago.
Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) challenge-response systems, are used to prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image, are designed to ensure requests are made by a human rather than an automated program. Websense reckons the latest Gmail Captcha hack is the most sophisticated it has seen to date.
Barracuda Networks is reporting that up to 90-95% of all email is spam. “They analyzed over one billion messages sent to its 50,000 customers. Barracuda says that the percentage of spam increased from 85-90 percent in 2006, and is way up from 5 percent back in 2001. After conducting a poll of 261 business professionals, Barracuda also found that over half—57 percent—consider spam to be the “worst form of junk advertising,” almost double that of junk snail mail. Only 12 percent cited telemarketers as the worst. “
From Ars Technica:
“Earlier this week, Sunbelt Software issued a report describing how malware creators use sophisticated page redirect techniques and forum-posting bots to increase the ranking of web pages that propagate their viruses. In response to growing concerns about search engine poisoning and the presence of malicious web sites in the Google index, the search company is calling for users to help out by reporting web sites that attempt to distribute malware. “
“Sunbelt Software has uncovered tens of thousands of individual pages that have been meticulously created with the goal of obtaining high search engine ranking,” wrote Sunbelt malware research team member Adam Thomas in a follow-up to the initial report. “For months now, our Research Team has monitored a network of bots whose sole purpose is to post spam links and relevant keywords into online forms (typically comment forms and bulletin board forums). This network, combined with thousands of pages [with redirects], have given the attackers very good (if not top) search engine position for various search terms.”
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071202-google-crowdsources-malicious-web-site-detection.html
More:
Google Blog
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/11/help-us-fill-in-gaps.html
From Wired:
“Google won’t disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.”
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/google_spam
I use Yahoo mail far more than I do Gmail. I have no idea why. I get tons of spam daily, much of it with obvious spam titles. Maybe its time I make the switch.
