Spam Takes a Christmas Holiday (But it Won't Last)

Maybe it was too much eggnog and fruitcake, or they were busy playing with their new toys – whatever the cause, international spammers took a serious break following Christmas.

The security firm Symantec released its State of Spam & Phishing for December 2010, which shows that global spam has fallen off significantly since August, dropping from more than 200 billion pieces of spam per day in August to less than 30 billion on Christmas Day. The numbers have continued to stay low into this month.

Symantec data analyst Matthew Nisbet believes the drop-off is due to a “huge reduction in output” from the Rustock botnet, which he called “by far the most dominant spam botnet of 2010” in a Symantec report.

Two other prominent botnets, Xarvester and Lethic, also went silent around the holidays.

But the break isn’t likely to last long, according to security experts.

Joe Stewart, director of malware analysis at SecureWorks, said in a Dec. 3 interview with SecurityNewsDaily that global spam is like the game “Whack-a-Mole” -- when one massive spam botnet slows down, another invariably takes its place .

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