Amount Of Spam Rising Again

Amount of spam messages decreased to the one third of normal for a couple of weeks when criminal operator's lines were disconnected. Restart of botnets has been going on since Monday and spam amounts are rising rapidly again. Amounts would be even higher but the worst botnet is still offline.

American McColo operator operates many controller servers of the world's biggest botnets. According to security companies closure of McColo sent at least Srizbi, Asprox and Rustock botnets offline.

During couple of weeks criminals have moved some of their controlling operations to other parts of the world, to Russia for example. Criminals even used a backup connection they successfully got by tricking internet service operator TeliaSonera to transfer data to new host in Russia. Last Sunday spam amounts decreased to minimal level but rapid increase began on Monday. According to Messagelabs security company (now part of Symantec) the reason behind increase is that Asprox and Rustock botnets have returned online. Also, Cutwail and Mega-D botnets have increased their posting amounts.

Though the spam amount is increasing it's still under half of the peak a few weeks ago. Security companies say that's because the worst botnet Srizbi is still offline. Messagelabs says that even half of the world's spam is sent thru Srizbi. Security researchers have estimated that Srizbi would consist of even over 300,000 PC computers connected to the internet.