Spam and botnets flood the Internet
At Gigaom, Sebastian Rupley reports on a Symantec study of Web traffic from spam and botnets:
How much of a drag is spam putting on the global broadband and messaging infrastructure, and where is it coming from? According to Symantec’s newly released 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, spam is a huge burden: In September, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 86.4 percent. And botnets — autonomous and automated collections of compromised computers — are responsible for 87.9 percent of it. Despite efforts to curtail botnet activity, it looks like the spam problem continues to grow.
ISPs are trying to filter out as much spam as they can and you probably don’t see a lot of the stuff that is sent to you. But the spam traffic is a big consumer of bandwidth.
Why are the botnets still growing? Because of all the insecure Windows systems out there that are in the hands of technically untrained or careless users.
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