For those of you paying attention, Microsoft, in cooperation with government authorities & Kaspersky, took down the Kelihos Botnet which was capable of sending out 3.8B spam messages per day.
This brings the total botnet shutdowns to 3:
- Sept 2010: Waledac – 80,000 computers, 1.5 billion spam emails a day
- Mar 2011: Rustock – 150,000 computers, 30 billion spam e-mails a day
- Sept 2011: Kelihos – 41,000 computers, 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day
What does this mean to you?
This saves everyone money & time.
- Diminished congestion on inbound mail pipes.
- Diminished mailbox sizes & storage utilization.
- Less administration & labor of enterprise mail filters.
- Increased end user productivity.
- Reduced risk of spam-originated malware infection.
Simply put, through the systematic dismantling of these botnets, overall spam has dropped worldwide by 64 billion messages, or roughly 71%. Here’s is a the timeline progression of diminished spam as a result of these botnet shutdowns.
- 90 billion – July 2010
- 60 billion – Dec 2010
- 22 billion – May 2011
22 billion to go. As the world pushes forward against botnets, we can all hope for a spam-free future.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 