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Filed under: Business, Internet, Security, E-mail

Mega-D botnet is the new spam king

The humans are dead.

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.

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