Major Spambot Killed
According to theregister.co.uk, a botnet (also know as Mega-D or Ozdok) which was responsible for 1/3 of all of the world’s spam has been wiped off the proverbial map. The responsible party, FireEye, analyzed the ins and outs of this botnet and attacked it’s commands and control channels, ultimately paralyzing it and rendering it useless.
The botnet operated through various control channels that sent out instructions to “zombie” machines in their network that would in turn send out spam.
Although this is great news in the long run, it won’t garner as much change as one might think, though. All of the IP addresses (more than 264,000) the botnet used were already blacklisted. For now, the ISPs will have to identify each individual IP address that was under the botnet’s voodoo hex and clean up the mess from there.
In 2008, a staggering 200 BILLION spam emails were sent per day. But now, without Mega-D looming around, that daily total will drop to around 134 billion daily spam emails. I know it’s still an overwhelming number to digest, but at least it’s a bit more manageable.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 10, 2009
Comments
Agreed. The war on spam is much like the war on drugs. We are never, ever going to completely eliminate all drugs in this country, much like we’re never going to eliminate bunk email 100%. We just have to fight it with what we have to work with and hope for the best.
But regardless, this is still good news. Thank you for your thoughts!
Posted by Bryan Quilty on 11/12/2009 10:09 AM
I hope to hear more news like this in the future. Thanks for your great blog, keep up the good work, and we in the email marketing industry will keep doing our best to provide customers with quality, valuable, emails.
Posted by Dan Lukens on 11/12/2009 10:39 AM
While this is a bit of a “drop in the bucket” situation, it is still good news for all email marketers. It’s questionable if email marketing will ever be able to escape the stigma of the dreaded spam but as long as we keep moving forward with responsible practices and list management, and keep taking spam bots like this down, we may have a chance.
Posted by Dan Lukens on 11/11/2009 10:13 AM