Christmas period sees fall in unsolicited messages but 70bn are then sent in one day as bot activity soars
A dramatic fall in the levels of emails advertising Viagra products and herbal medicines has caused a precipitous drop in global spam levels ? but today the unsolicited messages showed the first signs of a huge comeback.
Pharmaceutical promotions usually account for around 64% of all email spam globally ? around 60bn messages a day. This fell to as low as 0.1% over the Christmas period, accounting for a comparatively tiny 70m emails. "It's a drop in the ocean compared [to previous spam levels]," said Paul Wood, a senior analyst at cyber security firm Symantec.
The volume of total email spam dropped to its lowest point in two years last month, from 200bn a day in August to around 30bn daily at the end of December.
But today that figure rebounded sharply to 70bn emails, in the first sign of a resurgence since spam levels flatlined two weeks ago.
The vast majority of spam is sent by networks of virus-infected computers, known as botnets. The botnet responsible for just under half of all spam, known as Rustock, ceased activity on Christmas day, sending pharmaceutical spam into a nosedive.
However, overnight Rustock activity soared, prompting security experts to predict that spam levels in the next 24 hours could increase exponentially. Yesterday, Rustock accounted for 1.5% of all global spam, while this afternoon that figure stands at 30% and is rising all the time.
"This is a marked increase. It's still not the same as spam levels before Christmas but its a sign that, for whatever reason, Rustock had simply gone quiet," Wood told the Guardian.
"It is very unusual that they would go quiet of their own accord ? which is why this stands out much more than previous occasions ? but there must be a reason for it, which I suspect we'll get a sense of it in due course."
Rustock and other botnets are connected to the recently closed site Spamit.com, which was credited with propping up a large amount of global spam.
Those running spam campaigns, the most popular of which is unsolicited Viagra advertising, can measure the success of their campaigns via Spamit and then get paid on the basis of its performance.
Accurate figures for the monetary value of the global spam industry are hard to come by, but some court documents from previous prosecutions have cited a "conservative" figure of $100bn (�64bn) a year, according to Wood.
Targeting unwitting internet users through their email inbox is the primary route for spammers. But increasingly fraudsters are moving to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Hundreds of Twitter users found themselves inadvertently tweeting advertising for an acai berry diet last month, as hackers broke into the accounts of users whose password had been exposed by an attack on the Gawker websites.
Social networks are easy targets for spammers due to the ease of setting up a plausible-looking profile and hiding malicious links using popular URL shorteners, such as bit.ly.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/10/email-spam-record-activity
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