A Botmaster’s Perspective on Large-Scale Spam Campaigns

[66626ae901471Kolya]

An estimated 88% of all sent emails are spam. For anyone interested in how botnets continuously manage to flood the internet with spam, this recent paper provides a rare view behind the scenes and a scientific analysis of one of the world's largest spam botnets, the Cutwail/Pushdo botnet with about 100.000 bots: The Underground Economy of Spam: A Botmaster’s Perspective of Coordinating Large-Scale Spam Campaigns [PDF]

In August
2010, we obtained access to 13 Command & Control
(C&C) servers and 3 development servers (16 servers in
total) used by botnet operators of the Cutwail spam engine.
This software has been used by some of the most
prolific spammers over the last few years, and is frequently
installed by a separate Trojan component known
as Pushdo. Cutwail utilizes an encrypted communication
protocol and an automated template-based spamming
system to dynamically generate unique emails with the
goal of evading existing spam filters. Interestingly, each
Cutwail bot maintains highly detailed statistics about its
own spam activities, which are reported back to the C&C
server. The data we obtained from these C&C servers
provides us with a novel, deeper insight into the modus
operandi of cyber criminals and the dynamics behind
some of the most sophisticated spam operations to-date.

[66626ae901804Enchantermon]

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for linking it.