According to Postini, total spam has gone up 222 percent since November 2005 with 125 percent of this increase coming in the last 6 months. Major e-mail-borne virus attacks in January and February were aimed at creating more botnets for future attacks. Heightened virus activity began in late December 2006 with the "Happy New Year" spam virus attack and continued in January with the "Storm" e-mail attack. February has seen a steady stream of these types of attacks as hackers continue to harvest computers to add to their botnets.
The costs associated with the increased attacks have also skyrocketed. A new study from Ferris Research predicts that the global cost of spam in 2007 will be $100 billion compared to $50 billion in 2005. In the US alone, spam is expected to cost $35 billion in 2007, up from $19 billion 2 years ago.
"Following two of the largest outbreaks of e-mail viruses in history in December and January, as predicted, spam and other attacks reached all time highs in February," said Daniel Druker, executive vice president of marketing for Postini. "The rise of botnets has driven spam to be a $100 billion business issue in 2007, making it integral for all companies to seek solutions that keep their communications safe and productive."
These attacks represent a shift in tactics for the hackers away from self- propagating Internet worm viruses that copied and sent themselves to the e-mail addresses they found on the PCs they infected. Instead, hackers are now able to use the botnets that they have harvested in order to launch these attacks as spam e-mails with viruses attached to them.
By sending massive quantities of these e-mails timed with specific mainstream or newsworthy events, hackers only need a tiny fraction of these e-mails to get through and trick users into clicking on the attachment and infecting their PC. In this fashion the hackers are adding hundreds of thousands more computers to their botnets.
| Top Five Virus Counts for February | |
|---|---|
| netsky | 8,163,522 |
| zhelatin | 7,619,985 |
| mime | 2,123,674 |
| downloader-bai.gen | 1,872,857 |
| mytob | 1,855,049 |
| Total Viruses in February: | 55,708,511 |
