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Mega-D Botnet Overtakes Storm, Accounts for 32% of Spam
Stony Stevenson writes "The new Mega-D Botnet has overtaken the notorious Storm worm botnet as the largest single source of the world's spam according to security vendor Marshal. This botnet currently accounts for 32 percent of all spam, 11 percent more than the Storm botnet which peaked at 21 percent in September 2007. It started about 4 months ago but has been steadily increasing since then. It is also using news headlines to trick victims into opening the spam, a technique synonymous with the Storm worm."
It must work - I clicked on this article ...
"Mega-D botnet"? Pffft! That's nothing compared to the latest ship-and-anchor technology!
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I bet you've never run a mail server.
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It's ridiculous to think that mail parsers mean spam is conquered. If it was, then the Mega-D botnet wouldn't have even gotten out the door. Yet it has. Until people are educated to avoid spam, it will never be conquered. And the lack of education is evident because this botnet easily contains a plurality of all spam messages.
Spam is not annoying any more.... So you say all this spam is clogging up bandwidth? Well I bet it's still nothing compared with the bandwidth consumed by file sharing and video web sites.
It's not? You might lose that bet.
I bet you've never run a mail server.
I doubt he has either. My bandwidth logs show that several hundred megabytes of crap hits my network every day, and that's just what is allowed past the firewall. I don't really know how much other stuff is coming at my IP, because it's blocked. The amount of spam is really unbelievable, though, and it's pretty much just a continuous unauthorized consumption of my paid-for resources that does me no good at all. I also get unending attacks on my FTP and other remote services, constant port scans and worm penetration attempts. All that does is clog my pipe, and eats ISPs profit margins.
Besides, torrents and video sharing sites are services that benefit the end user. Regardless of whether people like the GP believe that people are paying their ISPs enough for them, they don't claim vast amounts of bandwidth in order to sell a few thousand bottles of fake Viag!ka and make a few dozen people wealthy. The cost/benefit ratio of bit torrent is quite a bit better than that of spam, I'd say.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.