Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers
April 9, 2008 – 5:20 PMStorm is a shadow of its former self, Kraken is just another name for Bobax and the biggest botnet goes by the mouthful of “Srizbi,” a noted botnet researcher said today as he released the results of his census of the various armies of hacked computers that spew spam.
Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks Inc., presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam. By extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.
The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names “Cbeplay” and “Exchanger” — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day.
While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the past year, it’s built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm’s botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. In fact, Storm is No. 5 on Stewart’s list.
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