According to a report released yesterday by McAfee, spam volumes have jumped over 140-percent since March of this year. This steady climb in spam only serves to further what is being called the longest streak of spam volume increases ever. In addition, botnet numbers are at an all-time high, McAfee says.
Spam and bots at an all-time high McAfee says.(IMG:J.Anderson)
There are more than 14 million systems infected worldwide by Malware that adds the infected hosts to one of several botnets. This growth in botnet numbers is a 16-percent increase over what was reported by McAfee in the first quarter of 2009. This 16-precent jump means that more than 150,000 systems are infected and added to a botnet daily. According to Gartner, this number would account for 20-percent of all new computers bought daily.
As the number of bots online continues to grow, Malware writers have begun to offer mSaaS, or Malicious Software-as-a-Service, to those who control botnets. By exchanging or selling resources, cybercriminals distribute new Malware to wider audiences instantaneously. Programs like Zeus - an easy-to-use Trojan creation tool - continue to make the creation and management of malware even easier, McAfee’s report says. Theses types of tools and services ultimately led to the creation of the botnets used to execute the DDoS cyberattacks against the White House, the New York Stock Exchange, and South Korean government Web sites in early July.
Directly related to the botnet growth is the severe climb in spam. McAfee says that this steady rise in spam traffic, and the growth in botnet related infections, is the largest reason that spam now accounts for 92-percent of all email sent. Spam volumes have now exceeded the highest volume on record by 20 percent, increasing at a steady rate of roughly 33-percent each month. In other words, spam volumes grow by over 117 billion emails every day.
While the growth in botnet traffic and spam were the focus of McAfee’s Q2 Threat Report, they also talked about the increase in attacks on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and online services like Twitter. The Koobface family of Malware is still growing and appears more often when linked to social networking attacks. In May, there were 4,300 new Koobface files discovered after a rash of spam on various social portals.
Likewise, the report also highlights the rate of detection of Auto-Run Malware. Over the course of 30 days, Auto-Run related Malware had infected more than 27 million files. This type of Malware, called Auto-Run because it exploits Windows’ Auto-Run capabilities, does not require any user clicks to activate, and often spreads through portable USB and storage devices.
McAfee said that the rate of detection for Auto-Run related Malware surpasses even that of the infamous Conficker worm by 400 percent, making Auto-Run the number one piece of Malware detected around the world.
The full report can be located here.
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