Global spam e-mail drops after hacker arrests
Levels of spam have fallen by almost 50% since August 2010, suggest figures.
Figures compiled by security firm Symantec show that the amount of junk e-mail messages flowing around the net has dropped 47% in three months. Kaspersky Labs noted a similar fall from July to September, when spam levels fell to 81.1% of all e-mails
The decline was put down to the arrests of those behind spam-sending botnets, and intelligence work that saw other spamming systems shut down.
Server shutdown
In the last few months security firms have scored several notable successes against gangs that own and operate botnets. One of the biggest successes was against the Pushdo or
Cutwail botnet, which had been in operation since 2007 and was thought
to be sending about 10% of global spam.
An international operation co-ordinated by the security firm LastLine managed to get 20 of the 30 servers controlled by the group shut down. The servers were turned off with the help of the internet service providers unwittingly found to be hosting them.
Bredolab was another big botnet hit in October thanks to work by the hi-tech division of the national crime squad in the Netherlands. The arrest of an Armenian man thought to be the botnet's controller led to the closure of the 143 servers linked to Bredolab.
Source : BBC Technology