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May 9th, 2008

Botnet Spams 60 Billion Emails A Day

Researchers claim the botnet Srizbi is responsible for 50% of all spam, and is the biggest of its kind in history. It’s 300,000 zombie computers can send out 60 billion messages a day and currently it is the single greatest spam threat which produces more spam than all the other botnets combined.

Trojan.Srizbi is one of the first full-kernel pieces of malware, according to Symantec. Srizbi has been documented selling watches, pens and of course Viagra. It hides itself as a rootkit and operates completely within the kernel, without any interaction in user mode. The Trojan is rumored to contain code capable of uninstalling competing rootkits.

The Srizbi botnet has grown quickly to overtake the rival Mega-D botnet since the start of the year. As Mega-D went offline, Srizbi stepped in to fill the gap and hasn’t looked back since. Mega-D rose quickly to prominence earlier this year after security researchers reported the Viagra-spamming botnet had topped Storm’s botnet peak spam output by 30%.

The Rustock botnet has taken the second spot as the most notorious spammer, followed by Hacktool.Spammer, Pushdo and Storm. About 15% of spam is from other sources.

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