Rustock Recovered but Bagle is Blitzing your Boxes

The Bagle botnet has replaced Rustock as the single biggest source of email spam since the start of January.

The miscreants behind Rustock took a break from sending out pharmaceutical spam over the festive season before returning earlier this month. Since its return on 10 January, Rustock made up for lost time and sent 17.5 per cent of all spam blocked by MessageLabs this month. Bagle, however, has kept its nose out front with the distribution of one in five spam messages polluting the interwebs.

Rustock alone was responsible for 47.5 percent of all spam, approximately 44.1 billion junk mail messages every day, at its peak. But now the global nuisance has been beaten by Bagle, something of a comeback kid in the spam distribution scene.