Unsuccessful battle against spam by Google

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» 19 April 2010

Unsuccessful battle against spam by Google

The amount of spam had settled at a steady rate after several botnets were put down some time ago. This came from a study conducted using the webmail filtering device of Google.

As of today, there was no evident influence on the number of spam after the botnets responsible for releasing spam has been reduced. The botnets targeted by Google, according to the Google Postini broadcasts, were Mariposa and Mega-D.

Fight against botnets is clearly on-going

According to some reports, the command-and-control servers that are linked with the spam-supplying Mega-D botnet were already cleaned up during the last part of year 2009. Thus, the 10th-ranking source of spam mails was successfully severed.

During the beginning of this year, several groups like the government agencies and security firms worked hand-in-hand in order to fight the widespread botnets such as the Mariposa, Waledac, and Zeus. Similar processes were used on Mariposa and Zeus botnets. Mariposa was restrained and the latter was impeded.

Battle continues as spam remains prevalent

The strength used by the eager parties was put to waste when there is still an apparent huge number of spam messages plaguing the web community. But then, there was a decrease of about 12 percent in the intensity of spam and virus online from the Q409 elevation. Still, according to Google Postini, the concentration of the spam remained fixed during the first three months of the year 2010.

Web criminals never fail in lauching more threats

It was written on the blog created by the Postini experts that there is still a lot of botnets lurking in the online community for the benefit of the spammers. Online crooks are able to live on even if one botnet were to be shut down. This is through purchasing, renting out, or even setting up another botnet. Hence, it becomes more complicated for the anti-spam groups to eliminate the sources of the spam mails even if one botnet is already shut down.

The recently-used strategy appeared to be fruitless just like the preceding method of attacking the rogue ISPs. This was presumed by the spam filtering division of Google after seeing the effect of the takedown.

As of the present, there is also a rise in the malware that are contained within spam mails. During the beginning of the year 2009, there was an increase of about 0.3 percent in the quantity of malware-containing spam messages. It, then, reached about 3.7 percent during remaining half of the same year. However, the magnitude decreased to 1.1 percent during the first few months of the year 2010.

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