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
.
Posted on 28 August 2009 by
Virus Bulletin
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