There has been a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam email sent worldwide recently. Recent data from security firm Symantec shows that spam levels have been steadily dropping since August, with a sharp decline in December.
There has been a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam email sent worldwide recently. Data from security firm Symantec shows that spam levels have been steadily dropping since August, with a sharp decline in December.
Symantec said that while 200 billion spam emails were being sent out daily in August, that number deflated to about 50 billion in December.
Most spam emails are sent via botnets. Rustock, the dominant spam bot last year, is almost inactive, compared to the amount of spam it was sending out months ago. Symantec said that since Dec. 25, spam coming from Rustock has comprised less then 0.5 percent of worldwide spam.
According to a BBC report, Rustock accounted for almost half (47 to 48 percent) of global spam at its peak.
Additionally, two other botnets have basically gone quiet. Since Dec. 28, Lethic has been inactive and Xarvester has been idle since Dec. 31.
"Whilst this is an excellent gift over the holiday season for anyone who regularly uses email, we would not expect the level of spam to stay this low for long," Mathew Nisbet, Symantec malware data analyst, said in a blog post. "As we saw after the closure of McColo in 2008, and following further takedown attempts in subsequent years, botnets rarely stay quiet for very long. Even if these three botnets don't come back soon, we would expect other botnets, even new ones, to pick up where they have left off - very soon."
The BBC said that these spammers could be organizing a new campaign. Because they are profit-driven, if the botnets aren't as lucrative as they'd like, they stop and regroup.
Spammers might have found a new niche sending out junk posts on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter suffered a spam attack last month via tweets that discussed the "acai berry." The attack was related a hack into Gawker's commenter password database, and Twitter encouraged users to change their passwords immediately.