Google Sees Spam Surging on Botnet Activity

Security researchers may have done a solid job containing some of the bigger botnets out there, but for every Mariposa, Zeus and Waledac that gets neutralized, scores more are out there waiting to fill in the gap.

The result? A 30 percent increase in spam messages, according to Postini, Google’s e-mail filtering and security division.

eSecurity Planet takes a look at Google’s latest spam analysis.

Botnets cranked out more spam and larger individual files containing spam in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest report from Postini, Google’s e-mail filtering and security service.

Despite the best efforts of security software developers and the mostly successful efforts to neutralize especially destructive botnets, such as Mariposa, Zeus and Waledac, Google’s datacenters reported a 30 percent increase in the size of individual spam messages at the end of March.

“This recent spate of botnet takedowns has not had a dramatic impact on spam levels,” Gopal Shah, a member of Google’s Postini services team, wrote in a blog posting.

Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Botnets Keep Spam Volume High: Google