600,000 A Day…

By Guy Bunker | April 24, 2009 | 1 Comment 

Guy Bunker

In the latest Internet Security Threat Report published earlier this month, we saw that bots increased 31% in 2008 (and it was 47% increase in EMEA). There is now a new report that shows a top end system can crank out 600,000 spam emails a day when it has been turned into a bot!

How much does it cost to rent a bot… well, we have seen the price on the underground economy drop to a measly $0.04 per bot per day… and there were nearly 5 million unique bots available in 2008, with an average of more than 70,000 available per day! Bots are now responsible for around 90% of spam…

What does a cyber-criminal want… well two things, firstly information that they can use or sell to make money and secondly a fast machine with a good internet connection. They need the latter to rent out to to run spam, phishing and denial of service attacks and scams. So keep your PC under lock and key (from a security perspective) otherwise you could be contributing to the problem spam as well as helping to line the cyber-criminals’ pockets.

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One Response to “600,000 A Day…”

  1. 1,900,000 Bots In A Network… : View From The Bunker on April 24th, 2009

    [...] 600,000 A Day… [...]

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