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DENVER Aug. 10, 2005 MX Logic, Inc., a leading provider of innovative email defense solutions that ensure email protection and security for businesses, service providers, government organizations, resellers and their customers, today reported that, for the third consecutive month, "zombie PCs" accounted for more than half of all spam.
An average of 56 percent of all spam filtered by the MX Logic Threat Center in July was sent from neglected, "always-connected" broadband PCs that spammers hijacked by installing a spam Trojan. Hijacked PCs represented the source of 62 percent of all spam in June and 55 percent in May.
"These statistics indicate that hijacked PCs have become not only the preferred distribution tool for spammers, but also a primary source of Internet pollution," said Scott Chasin, chief technology officer, MX Logic. "Zombie PCs impose a huge cost on Internet Service Providers, businesses and consumers, whose hijacked PCs identify them as a source of spam and result in their being blacklisted."
Once infected with a spam Trojan, zombie PCs provide worm authors with remote command-and-control spam-distribution capabilities, allowing them to create a legion of zombie computers that can pump out unwanted email and initiate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
In May the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with 35 government partners from over 20 countries, unveiled "Operation Spam Zombies." This international campaign is designed to educate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other Internet connectivity providers about hijacked computers.
In addition to its data on zombie PCs, MX Logic also issued the following statistics on email security.
Spam-Sending Domains Represent Biggest Users of SPF and Sender ID
In a sample of more than 19 million unique email messages that passed through the MX Logic Threat Center from July 17 through July 23, 2005, MX Logic found that:
- 9 percent were from domains that had published an SPF record, 83 percent of which were spam-sending domains; and - 0.15 percent was from domains that had published a Sender ID record, 82 percent of which were spam-sending domains.
"Just because an email has a published Sender ID or SPF record does not mean it is a legitimate email," Chasin said. "Nevertheless, widely deployed domain-based authentication is a key building block in creating accreditation and reputation services that can vouch for the domain's SPF or Sender ID record, as well as its email-sending history.