Security researchers recently discovered that more than 40% of the world’s spam is being churned out by just one culprit. The culprit is called the Rustock botnet, and may consist of millions of compromised computers, all press-ganged together to churn out an estimated 46 billion spam emails every single day.

What’s more troubling, most of those compromised computers belong to everyday users, maybe even you. Botnets work by infecting thousands, or in this case millions of computers. They use all kinds of tricks to get on to these computers – phishing scams, infected emails and attachments, Facebook and other social networking infections, and drive-by downloads.

And most of the time they’re successful because so many people (yes, maybe just like you) are not aware of the threat, how it occurs and how they make themselves more vulnerable.

In April of this year, Rustock had already compromised around 2.5 million computers. Once infected, those computers will secretively accept instructions from a bot controller (the hacker) and begin relaying all kinds of spam to millions of email addresses at a time.

Most of the computers are in North America and Europe, and security experts have been battling for months to shut the botnet down. But even if they’re successful, there are thousands of other botnets actively waiting to take over.

Lessons learned?

• Spam is much more than a nuisance, and is now a key player in most kinds of cyber attacks.
• Keep your spam shied up at all times. That means not sharing your email address, never responding to spam email, opening attachments, or clicking on links, and never forwarding spam gossip to others.

Rustock Botnet Responsible for 40 Percent of Spam
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100824/tc_pcworld/
rustockbotnetresponsiblefor40percentofspam

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1. The IDGuardian Podcast: Episode #005 — Threats Facing Consumers Online
2. Reflections from a Black Hat Hackers’ Conference (Part Two)
3. The IDGuardian Podcast: Episode #004 — Why Black Friday Could Be a Red Carpet for Scammers
4. IN THE HEADLINES: Are Consumers THAT WORRIED about Online Security?
5. The Tax Man Cometh (and identity thieves are not far behind)