Filed under: Business, Internet, Security, E-mail
Mega-D botnet is the new spam king
Mega-D Botnet would be a fantastic hip-hop name. Rolls of the tongue beautifully, botnet rhymes easily (hot set, caught yet, sought debt), and it's got a hyphen in it, which rumor has it keeps the kids interested. Unfortunately, the name is already tied to one of the greatest spamming machines to ever exist. It's the Jay-Z (he's still relevant, right?) of annoying emails.
Mega-D accounts for 32 percent of all spam right now. That's a disturbingly fat guy's slice of the spam pie chart. It's 11 percent more than the high water mark the Storm botnet hit in September 2007. It's kind of impressive, really. In a horrible way. Like a 500 car pileup on the freeway. Terrible, but you can't help but be in awe of the sheer capacity.
The botnet uses news headlines to trick people into opening spam. The spam promotes some pharmaceutical products including Herbal King and VPXL. In fact, promotion for VPXL makes up almost 75 percent of all pharma spam. VP of Products at Marshal speculates that it "is possible that the individuals behind the Storm botnet are responsible for one or more of these other botnets." Storm botnet programmers? Never. This is the handy work of Al-Qaeda. These terrorist won't rest until every warm blooded American is hooked on VPXL. We're on to you. You'll never get away with this terrorists. We'll find you. Just you wait.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kevin said 5:28PM on 2-06-2008
I don't understand why it's so difficult to track down spammers. They advertise products. When a really dumb pathetic person purchases these products the spammer either receives the money directly or takes a commission from someone. Someone somewhere, deep down after all the IP spoofing and fake addresses are waded through, is collecting this money. Follow the money!
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Marshall said 1:00PM on 2-07-2008
While I agree it should be possible to track them down, it is probably a bit more difficult than you are imagining. Also, once you do find the source, there may not be laws in their country that make spamming illegal. The operation is probably more than one person too, so do you arrest everyone, or just the CEO? It's not quite as clear cut as people would hope (like most crime).