Spammers Running Rampant

MessageLabs is one of those companies that absolutely knows what it is doing and the reports they produce regarding the types of spam and its causes are reliable. They say that spam has risen to comprise 3 of 4 emails for the month of October, and this is mostly due to trojans and botnets.

From Net-Security here:

MessageLabs announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for October 2006. In this report, MessageLabs highlights the sudden increase in spam levels as spammers gear up to the holiday season, attributed to a huge rise in recent botnet activities and the latest outbreak of the Warezov virus, responsible for dropping an aggressive spam Trojan.

A spam-sending Trojan dubbed “SpamThru” is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails.

The other contributing factor to the increase this month was the Trojan dropper called Warezov, one of the most aggressive Trojans seen this year. The initial strain of Warezov was seen on 14 August, however the most aggressive and virulent batch of variants appeared at midnight on 26 October. MessageLabs seized over 900,000 copies of the virus in the first 24 hours, when tens of thousands of copies of each variant were released in numerous batches. With each batch being different from the previous one, even a few bytes changed in the code allowed the Trojan to pass undetected though traditional anti-virus protection.