August 25th, 2010 → 7:54 am @ Sue Walsh
Security researchers say the massive Rustock botnet is currently responsible for 40% of the world’s spam volume. This is particularly impressive considering the number of infected computers under its control has dropped from 2.5 million to 1.3, probably as a result of increased detection by anti-virus software. Still, even with the reduction in size it is still pumping out nearly 50 billion spam messages a day.
Compromised computers spew spam.
Most of that spam is pharmaceutical, hawking counterfeit prescription drugs offered by the infamous group of Canadian Pharmacy websites. The drugs, which are freely distributed without a prescription, are made in India and China and are not regulated or inspected in any way. The group behind the Canadian Pharmacy scams is said to be connected to the Russian Mafia.
Rustock was thought to be using Transport Layer Security to encrypt its spam in an effort to make detection difficult but appears to have abandoned the practice, probably due to the affected it had on bandwidth and processing speed.
The botnet has been thriving since its recovery from the McColo shutdown back in November 2008. When the cybercriminal-friendly ISP had its service terminated by its upstream providers, Rustock went dark, but the herders behind it acted quickly to switch its command and control servers to another host and began developing ways to keep it from depending on a single host, which has kept it from further shut downs. Botnets are now programmed with a list of different domains and IPs to contact for instructions, so if one goes down, a new one can easily and quickly be found.
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Rustock Botnet Responsible for 40% of All Spam
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