To state that it has been a while since my last blog post would be an understatement. I will quote a true unnamed mentor of mine and just say, “Life Happens.” My work changed and brought me into the world of Project Management. This subject almost interests me as much as Information Security. I want to highlight this TechRepublic article because it describes the most recent top 10 spam botnets. The economic reasons for spam and why the spammers use botnets became somewhat clearer to me.
The top 10 spam botnets: New and improved
by Michael Kassner, February 25th, 2010
While doing research for this project, I came across a blog series (first, second, third post) that forced me to rethink. Ranking spam botnets is not as simple as I thought. The blog author, Terry Zink, pointed out that there are several measurement philosophies:
- The number of bot members
- The number of bytes sent
- The number of messages sent
In the grand scheme of things, it may not seem important. But techies like details. Counting the number of bot members or bytes sent is straightforward enough. You would assume that the number of messages would be, too.
Well, it’s not. Botnets are smart enough to create a spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients. That adds another factor when counting messages.
Confused? So am I. To make some sense out of it all, I juggled the different attributes (totally unscientifically, of course) and came up with the following list of the best of the breed.
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