Take-down of rogue ISP sees temporary drop in spam levels
Spam levels back to normal within a few days.
The take-down of the rogue ISP Real Host on 1 August saw spam levels temporarily drop by more than
a third, Messagelabs claims in its monthly Intelligence Report.
The provider, based in Riga, Latvia, was linked with various kinds of malicious activity. In particular, it is believed
to have hosted the command-and-control centres of the Cutwail botnet (also known as Pandex
or Pushdo), which is responsible for about 15 to 20 per cent of the spam sent out worldwide. After the take-down
the total spam levels dropped by 38%.
After Atrivo (InterCage), McColo and Pricewert (3FN), Real Host is the fourth
major rogue provider to have successfully been taken down.
In the well-reported case of the McColo take-down, it was several
months before spam levels recovered, however in this case
it took just three days for spam levels to recover - suggesting that botnets have become less dependent on their ISPs. (It
should also be noted that a measured drop in spam levels is not felt the same by
everyone.)
In the same report, MessageLabs also discussed the ongoing popularity of
URL-shortening services in spam campaigns. On one day in July, more than 9 per cent of
all spam contained a shortened URL.
The full report can be downloaded as a PDF
here, with comments on the
AllSpammedUp blog here and
from Damballa's Gunter Ollmann, about the ambiguities involved in measuring botnet sizes,
here.
28 August 2009
Tags:
botnet, spam.
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1 comment
with the cell phone co.s over charging, play cosly games,selling phone number list, that rackup expencive minnets. give and sell phone hacking software that realy get the cash moving. no let the co. pay as part of the servises.
by one cent, 10 September 2009, 11:03
