Merry Christmas to your email inbox: On Christmas Eve, the world's largest spamming operation—believed to be operated by Russians and dubbed the "Rustock botnet"—suddenly stopped sending spam, and two other botnets went quiet thereafter: "Lethic" on Dec. 28 and "Xarvester" on Dec. 31. Rustock alone had sent nearly half the world's spam, so the dip was remarkable: from 70 billion messages per day before Christmas to 30 billion. (Global spam traffic peaked in August at 200 billion messages per day—92.2 percent of all email.)
The reason for the botnets' sudden disappearance is a mystery. A spam ring called SpamIt, which paid spammers to promote things like online pharmacies, shut down in late September after an investigation by Russian authorities, so perhaps the botnets ran out of business. Russian officials also recently arrested two spammers, so perhaps other spammers are scared....
Bill Noonkesser | 8/1/2014
