Six botnets churning out 85 percent of all spam
Back in early February, we covered the rapid rise of the Mega-D botnet and its various social-engineering-based attack methods. At the time, there was some question as to what malware was behind the creation of Mega-D (it has since been identified as Ozok), and no definite time frame as to when the botnet might be shut down. Now, according to security firm Marshal, Mega-D's profile is shrinking, thanks to a 10-day control server failure, but another botnet, Srizbi, is quickly moving into the gap.
Srizbi is a spambot trojan that has been on a self-propagating kick of late. The attack vector in this case is unsophisticated and involves a great deal of celebrity porn spam. We recently reported on the malware market's increasing preference for multilingual hackers, but the folks behind Srizbi apparently haven't gotten that memo; a screenshot of one offending advertisements informs potential prey that "The pornos is New!"
