Spam Levels Still Down but Expected to Come Back
In a followup to last week's story about the drop in spam volume that came after an ISP cut off a large volume spammer, the Washington Post reports spam volumes are still down.
The WP credits the continued let up in spamming to undirected bots:
hundreds of thousands of computers that remain infected with these bot programs were left like sheep without a shepherd, waiting and searching the Web for a new set of instructions from the criminal gangs that controlled them.
Those bots are a valuable resource to spammer and how long it takes to reestablish control should give us a good idea about the resiliency of the command and control structure. The bot herders had a single point of failure in their system and now it is a matter of the bots finding the new controller or the controllers finding the bots. This could be one of the most valuable opportunities to study botnet control structures that we've had.
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