The top 10 spam botnets: New and improved
Date: February 25th, 2010
Author: Michael Kassner
Latest reports have spam accounting for more than 95 percent of all email messages. You can thank botnets for most of that. Here's what we're up against.
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While doing research for this project, I came across a blog series (first, second, third post) that forced me to rethink. Ranking spam botnets is not as simple as I thought. The blog author, Terry Zink, pointed out that there are several measurement philosophies:
The number of bot members
The number of bytes sent
The number of messages sent
In the grand scheme of things, it may not seem important. But techies like details. Counting the number of bot members or bytes sent is straightforward enough. You would assume that the number of messages would be, too.
Well, it's not. Botnets are smart enough to create a spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients. That adds another factor when counting messages.
Confused? So am I. To make some sense out of it all, I juggled the different attributes (totally unscientifically, of course) and came up with the following list of the best of the breed. The botnets are arranged in order of spam activity, with the most popular name being listed first:
