#IMESSAGE SPAM BOT PDF#
#IMESSAGE SPAM BOT SERIES#

Rustock is also known for forging legitimate email newsletters using image files. Today, Rustock's signature is to deliver spam only from 3 a.m. Before McColo, Rustock's trademark was to generate huge amounts of spam, then go dormant for several months. But it's back and currently the largest botnet, with almost two million bots.

It was almost destroyed when McColo was shuttered in 2008. The Pushdo/Cutwail botnet spews spam with a wide variety of subject matter, including pharmaceuticals, online casinos, phishing schemes, and links to malware-laced Web sites. It then downloads Cutwail, the spamming software. Pushdo is the downloader, which gains access to the victim computer. But Pushdo is still going strong, sending out approximately 19 billion spam email messages a day from one and a half million bots. Pushdo started at the same time as Storm, in 2007. Bobax appears to be a botnet for hire, as the type of spam varies. Or more impressively, 1,400 spam email messages per bot per minute. Right now, Bobax has only 100,000 members, yet it produces 27 billion spam messages a day. The authors converted command and control traffic to HTTP, making it more difficult to block and trace. 2: Bobax (Kraken/Oderoor/Hacktool.spammer)Р”В«obax confuses botnet hunters, being somewhat related to the Kraken botnet. There must be money in this, as most spam botnets are involved with it to some degree. Yet it accounts for almost 25 percent, or 40 billion spam-emails a day. It's relatively small, only 600,000 members. This botnet is of special interest to researchers. It's also sneaky, infecting files used by Autorun registries. It's a kernel-mode rootkit and thus hard to detect.

#IMESSAGE SPAM BOT PDF#

Note: This article is also available as a download that includes a PDF version and a PowerPoint presentation. The botnets are arranged in order of spam activity, with the most popular name being listed first: 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. That adds another factor when counting messages.Р”В¬onfused? So am I. Botnets are smart enough to create a spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients. You would assume that the number of messages would be, too. Counting the number of bot members or bytes sent is straightforward enough. In the grand scheme of things, it may not seem important. The blog author, Terry Zink, pointed out that there are several measurement philosophies: Ranking spam botnets is not as simple as I thought.

#IMESSAGE SPAM BOT SERIES#

While doing research for this project, I came across a blog series ( first, second, third post) that forced me to rethink. Latest reports have spam accounting for more than 95 percent of all email messages.

Imessage spam bot