Where Does Spam Come From?

Marshal, and Email and Internet content security company, analyzes spam traps it has placed throughout the Internet and looks for trends in spam creation, distribution, and origination.

Their most recent findings are quite interesting. Their analysis shows that six types of bots are responsible for 85% of all spam. The Srizbi bot is now the leader of spam accounting for over 40% of spam followed by the Rustock botnet responsible for 21%. Spam coming from the Mega-D botnet was temporarily stopped after control servers were taken out in mid-February. The estimated 35,000 zombie clients associated with the Mega-D botnet were infected with the Ozdok Trojan.

Srizbi has become very stealthy, evading most sniffers, and operates in full kernel mode. It has advanced features that allow it to report back statistics to control servers letting it know which attacks were successful. This data has allowed them to constantly adapt and become more effective. Recently some spammers have found ways to defeat captcha techniques (>35% of the time).

Interesting to note in their findings is that most spam (70%) promotes male enhancement pills.

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