Fergie's Tech Blog

One Bot-Infected PC = 600,000 Spam Messages a Day

Gregg Keizer writes on ComputerWorld:

Some bot-infected PCs can crank out as many as 25,000 spam messages per hour, new research released today claimed.

Orange, Calif.-based Marshal8e6 deliberately infected machines in the lab of its research arm, TRACElabs, with the malware responsible for the world's nine biggest spam botnets, then observed the PCs' behavior, including each bot's top-end spam capacity.

"One of the our objectives over the past few years has been to emphasize the dominant role that a handful of key botnets play in the spam we see today," said Phil Hay, a senior threat analyst at TRACElabs, in an e-mail today.

TRACElabs concluded that Rustock and Xarvester, the latter perhaps linked to the down-and-out Srizbi botnet, are the most efficient spam spewers of the nine bots. Each is capable of sending up to 25,000 messages per hour, or 600,000 per day, and 4.2 million per week.

posted by Fergie @ 4/22/2009 02:11:00 PM