* Zotob worm creates spam-spewing zombies
Depending on whose spam statistics you follow, the spam juggernaut has shown signs of slowing just a bit over recent months.
MessageLabs’ spam statistics show that the percentage of e-mail it processed that was spam reached 94.5% in July 2004, but had dropped to 65.2% in July 2005. AppRiver shows the percentage of e-mail that is spam holding reasonably steady over the past six months. Postini found that 88% of the e-mail it processed in 2004 was spam; the current figure is around 70%.
Then along came the Zotob worm. CipherTrust reported that it saw a 14% increase in the amount of spam generated by the worm in just a 24-hour period during the week of Aug. 15. The increase was reportedly caused by Zotob’s creation of hundreds of thousands of new zombies that were each generating significant amounts of spam.
What this points out is how vulnerable we all are to things that are both within and totally outside our control. For example, it’s relatively easy to control Zotob, its variants and other threats in an enterprise environment simply by maintaining anti-virus, anti-spam and related defenses. While several high profile organizations became infected by Zotob the problem was eradicated fairly quickly. However, the millions of home PCs that have a broadband connection are an easy target for virus writers, since a large percentage of home PC users are lax about maintaining their threat protection.
The obvious solution to the problem is for home users to update their threat protection on a continual basis. Another good solution is for ISPs to implement tools like MX Logic’s Sender Reputation Gateway that can identify individual subscribers whose PCs have likely become zombies.
Until home users get their threat protection act together, or until systems are in place to quickly identify and deal with zombies, we will continue to be susceptible to sudden spikes in spam and other messaging threats.
