Botnets thrive in 2010 with Rustock as the king of spam

In spite of many efforts applied to shut down infamous botnets that distribute tons of spam across the Internet they continue to thrive and live with Rustock still remaining the largest network in the industry, reports Symantec. This year Rustock sent over 44 billion spam e-mails per day and had more than one million bots under its control. Botnets Grum and Cutwail are the second and third largest respectively, the report said.

In August 2010 the spam rates reached their high at 92.2 percent of all e-mail sent when by new malware variants and quickly put to use. Overall, spam levels reached 89.1 percent, an increase of 1.4 percent compared with 2009. For most of 2010 spam from botnets accounted for 88.2 percent of all spam.

While the spam decreased after the closure of spam affiliate, Spamit, in early October 2010, and at that time botnets accounted for 77 percent of spam, the total number of active bots have already returned to roughly the same number as at the end of 2009, increasing by approximately 6 percent in the latter half of 2010. The total number of botnets worldwide is between 3.5 and 5.4 million, said Symantec officials.