Rustock botnet ditches encryption to ramp spam
Bot controllers stop TLS experiment, reckons Symantec
By John E Dunn | Techworld | Published: 15:07, 24 August 2010
The Rustock mega-botnet appears to have ditched the experimental use of TLS (transport layer security) to obscure its activity, Symantec has reported.
Rustock’s use of TLS is now averages between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all spam, peaking at 0.5 percent, a tiny fraction of the levels seen in March when it reached averages of around 25 percent with a peak of as much as 77 percent.
The key moment was on 20 April, when the volume of spam featuring the tactic suddenly plunged to sub-one percent levels after an equally sudden rise in rates in the weeks prior to that date.
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TLS adds a small but cumulative overhead to server email processing, which ties up mail servers but also affects the rate at which spam is sent. Why Rustock’s controllers adopted the technique at all was never clear but might have been connected to a misplaced belief that it would make it harder for servers to filters its activity or detect the command and control system used to direct its activity.
“It would seem that the botnet controllers, especially those behind Rustock, have perhaps realised that the use of TLS gave them little or no discernable benefits, and instead impeded their sending capacity owing to the additional bandwidth and processing overhead needed for TLS,” reckons the August 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report.
If the benefits of using TLS were marginal, the change in tack could be related to the need to send more spam. After the switch off, Rustock’s spam rate per bot doubled from 96 per minute to 196 per minute.
“The drop in TLS encrypted spam will come as a welcome relief to many IT managers who were worried about the resource that this type of spam had been consuming on their networks.”
By August, Rustock has been sending a staggering 46.2 billion spam messages every day, by Symantec’s calculation around 41 percent of all spam detected by the company.
The UK’s contribution to global spam volumes is now around 4.5 percent, with 91.9 percent of all messages in the country being spam. The MessageLabs division, which provides the figures, has a bias towards business customers, which could explain why its spam percentages are a bit higher than those of other security companies. All business sectors are heavily spammed.
