Srizbi is World’s Most Prevalent Spam Botnet

Technology News Daily reports on the latest findings of Marshal’s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team, indicating that the Srizbi botnet comprises 49.4 percent of all spam for the week ending May 4, 2008–making Srizbi “the world’s largest spam botnet.” (Marshal is an e-mail and Internet-content security service provider.)”Srizbi is estimated to comprise at least 300,000 compromised computers and sends more than 60 billion spam messages per day. Recently, the botnet has been used to promote a range of products including watches, pens and male enlargement pills. Srizbi also actively distributes copies of its own malware in malicious spam campaigns using social engineering ploys to trick recipients into infecting their computers.”Here are some other interesting statistics from the TRACE team’s recent findings:The average size of a spam message is 2.9KBThe next-most active spambot, Mega-D represents 17.3 percent of all spamThe United States produces the most spam of any countryTurkey produces the next most spam