An article in the New York Times on spam and botnets quotes some ballpark figures:
- 11% of the 650 million computers on-line contain botnet code
- 250,00 new systems get botted every day
- 80% of all spam originates from botnets
That little snippet of news came from Support Intelligence, a commercial company that is monitoring the Internet for spam, botnets etc., analyzing the origins and publishing some of the more interesting details in their blog (as well as selling the data to their clients). Many big-name companies are named and shamed, in other words spammers have evidently infitrated major corporate networks, setting up botnets that spew forth spam through the corporate email systems, some of which run mainstream antispam software such as Ironport (perhaps it is configured only to spam-check inbound email?).
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