A Month After Grum Botnet Takedown, Spam Back To Previous Levels

wiredmikey writes "It's been over a month since spam-spewing Grum botnet has been shut down, but spam experts say there hasn't been a noticeable impact on global spam volume. Symantec researchers at the time estimated that Grum was responsible for one-third of all spam being sent worldwide, and its takedown led to an immediate drop in global spam email volumes by as much as 15 to 20 percent. However, the drop was only temporary. While Grum had an estimated hundred thousand zombies sending spam, the machines were likely blocked for sending emails too frequently, or wound up on IP blacklists, said Andrew Conway, Cloudmark researcher. IP filtering is fast and cheap, and is a good first line of defense against spam, Conway said. Grum spam was easy to blacklist, and despite its size, most spam messages from the botnet probably never reached user inboxes."

Comments

Called in reinforcements?

[Nidi62]

Is it not possible they simply have a few botnets sitting around unused ready to be activated should an active botnet go down? While the revenue of having one botnet operating with one in reserve probably wouldn't be as high as having both operating, it would give a greater guarantee of continued revenue.

Market simply responding to demand

[cpu6502]

A company gets shutdown, but the demand for email advertising is still there, so other companies move-in to fill the need of customers. (Same thing happened with megaupload..... shutting it down didn't stop file sharing. It just showed the U.S. government is a lackey/hitman for the Hollywood megacorps. AKA fascist.)

Filtering != Stopping

[damn_registrars]

Filtering can be a good first line defense, yes. However it will never, ever solve the spam epidemic on its own. No amount of filtering ever will.

This is about a group that took a better step, in going after a botnet. That is more effective than filtering in the long term, but still won't do the trick.

The long term solution comes from acknowledging that spam is an economic problem. A lot of reactionary measures (such as filtering) treat spam almost as if it is a game or a personal attack on themselves. Spammers don't give a shit who you are or what your reaction is to spam. Spammers just want to make money. Someone is paying them to send out spam. If you want to stop spam for real, you need to stop the money. If the spammers don't get paid, they don't send out spam.

It's that simple. Everything else just kicks the can down the road.