95 Billion Spam E-mails Sent in 2010

13 December 2010 | 03:54 PM ET | Matt Liebowitz, SecurityNewsDaily Staff Writer

If you feel like more spam has been hitting your inbox this year, you're not alone. By the end of 2010, 95.1 billion spam e-mails will have been sent, according to the MessageLabs Intelligence Report issued by the security firm Symantec.

According to the report, 89.1 percent of all e-mails sent are spam. 1 in 284.2 e-mails contain malware and 1 in 444.5 e-mails contain phishing scams. 3,055 malicious websites are blocked each day, and experts also identified 339,600 different types of malware, a hundredfold increase from 2009.

These seem like shocking statistics, but security analysts aren’t surprised.

“Spam e-mails are the biggest money-makers,” said Joe Stewart, director of malware analysis at the firm SecureWorks. The majority of botnets – groups of hijacked computers programmed to automatically distribute spam – operate in Russia and Eastern Europe, keeping them relatively safe from discovery, said Stewart. As long as that’s the case, the spam campaigns will continue.

“There’s not a lot of risk to run an operation in Eastern Europe,” Stewart told SecurityNewsDaily. The operations that ran in the United States got shut down by the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), but “CAN-SPAM doesn't apply to Russia -- they can pump out as much spam as they want. They’re still making most possible money with least possible risk,” he said.

Stewart said that even the arrest of a large-scale botnet operator, such as Oleg Nikolaenko, the 23-year-old Russian mastermind of the “Mega-Dâ botnet , does little to deter the spamming community.

Arrests and takedowns “just cause them to shift their methods,” Stewart told SecurityNewsDaily. “Sometimes people are arrested, and maybe you cut spam in half for a week. That’s about as much as we can hope for.”

Stewart said the problem of spam isn’t just that it’s being so widely distributed, but also that the offers for the most commonly shilled items -- herbal enhancement pills, over-the-counter prescriptions, replica handbags and knockoff Rolex watches -- are still reaching a willing audience.

“There are plenty of people willing to purchase these products,” Stewart said. “As long as that’s the case, there’s not going to be any end to spam, and the bigger these botnets are going to become.”

And they definitely got big – as of the end of 2010, there are roughly 5 million botnets in operation worldwide, accounting for about 77 percent of all spam, according to the MessageLabs report.

The most notable botnet in 2010 – which, presumably, will carry this title into 2011 -- is “Rustock,” which sent 44.1 billion e-mails and accounted for 47.5 percent of all spam. The botnets called “Grum” and “Cutwail” rounded out the top three, sending 7.9 billion and 5.9 billion messages respectively.

If spam trends continue in 2011 – and Stewart is confident they will – Africa and India will join the global malware game.

Botnets in India accounted for 8.5 percent of all spam, making it the largest single source of spam from one country, according to MessageLabs.

Africa is quickly increasing its broadband Internet availability, and the new Internet users, according to MessageLabs, have “little or no protection from malicious threats and little awareness about computer security.”

This dangerous combination puts Africa on the map among the world’s global spammers -- by the end of 2010, more than 3 percent of spam originated in Africa, compared to just more than 2 percent in 2009.

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