Symantec Intelligence

The Symantec Intelligence Blog published by Symantec.cloud serves as a conduit for communicating Intelligence data, trends and statistics based on analysis of cyber security threats, trends and insights from the Symantec Intelligence team comprised of many world-renowned malware and spam experts. Sitting on the front lines of defense, they have a global view of threats across multiple communication protocols drawn from the billions of web pages, email and IM messages they monitor each day.

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    Updated: Paul Wood 18 Mar 2011

    Has The Rustock Botnet Ceased Spamming?

    Posted on behalf of Mat Nisbet, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec.cloud   Brian Krebs posted on KrebsonSecurity a report about the Rustock botnet apparently going quiet yesterday, and spam from the botnet ceasing. I can confirm that at around 15:30 UTC, on 16 March, spam identified as coming from the botnet known as Rustock ceased sending spam, as shown below: In the chart above, the spike on this chart is actually normal behaviour for Rustock, as can be seen from this next chart, covering a longer time period: For the last year or so, Rustock has been the dominant source of spam in the world, by the end of 2010, accounting for as much as 47.5% of all spam. At it’s peak it was responsible...
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    Updated: Daren Lewis 23 Aug 2010

    August Botnet Distribution

    In the August 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence report (available here on Tuesday) we present our analysis of the top botnets globally. An analysis of individual bot IP addresses allows mapping of the physical location of bots. This animation allows you to view the variation in geographic concentrations of bots between the top five botnets as reported in the August report: Rustock Grum Cutwail Mega-D Lethic The animation displays each botnet for two seconds. To see an interactive version vist: http://www.messagelabs.com/intelligence Bots are widely distributed globally with greater prevalence in those areas with high levels of computer and broadband adoption. In this analysis, with the bots localized to a one degree of...