14 DAY TRIAL // For the third month in a row, Europe has been the top source of spam, according to security vendor Symantec. It's a worrying fact, because historically, the United States have been the leader of the trend, both in spam sent and as the most spammers' home. Hearing what Frederik Sjostedt has to say and in what terms he talks about people that deliver spam is somehow frightening: words like gangs and turfs are no strangers to the vocabulary used in an interview gave to ZDNet.
The one thing that Europe has ahead of the U.S. at the moment is the penetration of broadband and, by that, the possibility that compromised computers send spam faster. It's like with a waterslide, the wider the stream, the better and more people can use it at one time.
"The majority of spammers were US-based, but now we're seeing a lot of Eastern European and Russian spam gangs active. Spammers tend to use closer turf as a jump off point." The age of individual spammers and malware coders has passed, Sjostedt thinks. Botnets are now in full fashion and having Storm, the world's biggest botnet sending spam in Europe does not help. So far, Storm has mainly focused on the US, with people allegedly helping from the inside, while the controllers of the entire process, again allegedly, resided in Russia. The best definition for what Storm really is would be a network of compromised computers with sophisticated attack and defense mechanisms, including 'fast-flux' command and control servers, which frequently change location.
A great part of the fault for spam reaching the magnitude today belongs to Adobe and Microsoft, according to Mark Stephens, a noted tech journalist: "We are still paying for the years Adobe and Microsoft spent blissfully ignoring security vulnerabilities, though they seem to be trying harder now (barn door, meet escaped horse)."
Some analysts consider the Storm network to count somewhere between 1 and 50 million PCs being infected, and compared the power of the machine chain to the top 500 computers in the world put together: worst case scenario, the supercomputers would be 25 times less powerful than Storm, which they believe is currently running at 10-20 percent of its capacity.