Spam Increased 141%

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:50:55 +0000

Spam levels have increased in the last few months, since March more precisely, in a 141% said McAfee Threat Report from Second Quarter in 2009. The main reason resides in another increase: botnets (infected computers used for spamming and other attacks) up to 16%. Need an explicit number? That translates in 117 billion spam emails every day.

The number that is quite disturbing as well, is the botnets that are currently infected: 14 million computers. 150k every day, that represent 20% of all the computers that are acquired every day. And these botnets and zombies they are not only responsible for most of the spam, also they generated other attacks like denial-of-service to the White House, New York Stock Exchange and South Korean government web sites.

About South Korea, that’s the country that increased the most in the botnet activity, up to 45%; but yes, the US keeps in the top of that list with over 15% of the entire zombie population.

These spam numbers do not come alone, malware attacks have increased, specially the ones that infect the Windows auto-run that do not require any user intervention to “spread the evil”. That type of malware even outnumbered the Koobface or the Conflicker attacks.

This is a battle that will never end I think, I’m sure that those that depend on this kind of battles will not let it end.

What do you think?

Koobface Attacks and Twitter

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:33:30 +0000

Koobface malware found his way to infect thousands of Twitter users in the last days, increasing of course the number of Twitter updates giving messages like “My home video [url]“. The URL mentioned is listed randomly, all directing the traffic to a Koobface site.

Twitter’s reaction was fast and already suspended most of the users infected to avoid the virus from spreading. TrendMicro blogged about this and is already giving their users the solutions if they were infected.

This is apparently the second attack given by Koobface in Twitter, the first one used only three different TinyURLs with infected users; this malware mutation gave the infection a longer life than the previous one, that also appeared on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and LiveJournal.

There’s no question about it, when you are that big, you will always have attackers and damage control will be needed.

Crenk » Koobface

Spam Increased 141%

Koobface Attacks and Twitter