now a days spams have became the part and parcel of the e-mails in our day to day life.. the below image shows the spam affected areas in the whole world.
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The number of spam e-mail messages circulating on the Internet tumbled at the end of December after the world’s largest spamming operation mysteriously went dark on Christmas Eve.
A network of malware-infected computers known as the Rustock botnet, which is widely believed to be Russian-operated and had been responsible for about half of all spam globally, “appears to have completely gone of the map and is yet to resume,” said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, a unit of the security-software maker Symantec.
Rustock simply stopped sending spam, he said, adding that no one really knows why.
the above graph chart is the survey made by the symentec.
It has, though, he said, continued to engage in another type of online crime known as click fraud, in which bogus clicks are used to defraud advertisers who pay for Web traffic by the click.
At the same time, two other smaller botnets known for sending spam also dropped off for unknown reasons. The Lethic botnet went quiet on Dec. 28, and the Xarvester botnet on Dec. 31.
“Did the people in charge of these botnets suddenly go on vacation? Symantec wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “Currently there are no explanations on why these botnets stopped spamming.” The upshot, though, is that global spam volumes dropped to about 30 billion messages a day from about 70 billion before Christmas, according to MessageLabs. The decline added to a downward trend under way since August, when spam peaked at some 200 billion spam messages a day, or 92.2 percent of all e-mail. The firm attributes the general decline to a reduction in spamming by botnets, which accounted for 88 percent of spam until their activity began trailing off in the latter part of the year.
One theory for why Rustock and the other botnets stopped spamming is that an important source of business may have dried up. In late September, a large spam ring, SpamIt.com, ceased operations, after an investigation by Russian authorities. SpamIt had paid spammers to promote online pharmacies primarily. Without SpamIt, perhaps, “at least for now, there’s no content to fill the spamming cannons that Rustock has,” said John Reid, of Spamhaus, a nonprofit group that tracks spammers. Or they could be intimidated. In addition to going after the man behind SpamIt, Russian authorities recently arrested two spammers in Taganrog, a port town in southern Russia, who had a database of nearly two billion United States and European Union e-mail addresses they had used to spread malicious programs, according to a December report by the HostExploit blog.
“Even if the people were unrelated, the chilling effect of arrests can cause others to lay-low for a while,” Mr. Reid said, adding, “But all this is speculation.”
Or it could just be the calm before the storm. “They might be revamping for some new campaign,” said Andre’ M. Di Mino of The Shadowserver Foundation, a group that tracks malicious online activity. “They might be taking a break for awhile. But the infrastructure is still there. This just looks to be a pause.”
Internet security experts did not think the decline will be permanent. “I honestly think the impact of this will be short lived,”
Mr. Sergeant of MessageLabs said, pointing out that spamming is a lucrative business. Others will likely pick up where these groups left off, he said, and these groups could return to spamming at any time.
“All we can do is enjoy this current calm and wait for it to start back up again,” he said.
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sujan suresh
