
Six per cent more than last year
Despite better policing against spam companies the amount
of the stuff floating around the world wide wibble is six per cent higher than
last year. According to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini
Those successes meant that the volume of spam fell 12 percent from the fourth
quarter of 2009 to the first of 2010, although levels remained
higher than a year earlier.
However the security firms have been doing a great job at
smashing botnets this year and the only reason Google identified for that
year-on-year growth was that the botnets pushed out a higher volume of
virus-laden spam in the second half of the 2009 than in the first half (3.7 percent compared to 0.3 percent), with a peak in the
fourth quarter of up to 100 million virus-infected messages a day. Many of the
machines infected by those viruses would have been recruited to join the
botnets, Google said.
Security researchers soon switched their attentions to
the botnet command-and-control servers themselves, infiltrating them and
preventing the botnet from receiving new instructions. Successes against the Waledac, Mariposa and Zeus botnets,
has had little effect on spam volumes, with spammers simply turning to another
botnet to deliver their e-mail, Google said. However the successes meant that the volume of spam fell
12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first of 2010, although
levels remained higher than a year earlier.