Category Archives: Botnets

Festi botnet infesting the world, July 2012

Autonomous Systems (ASes) infested with Festi botnet spammed more than any others worldwide, pushing whole new countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey into the top of the top 20 countries in the July SpamRankings.net, and pushing India to number 1 worldwide. . Here we look at the top 10 ASes infested by Festi.

Taking off like a rocket was SaidiNet's AS 25019 SAUDINETSTC-AS of Saudi Arabia. Rising almost as fast was National Internet Backbone's AS 9829 BSNL-NIB of India. Also on an upwards path was academic network AS 8386 KOCNET of Turkey.

Linear Top 10 ASNs with Festi botnet

Linear Top 10 ASNs with Festi botnet
Chart by John S. Quarterman for SpamRankings.net.

Maybe already peaked were AS 24560 AIRTELBROADBAND-AS-AP – Bharti Airtel Ltd. AS 9121 TTNET – TTnet AS AS 17813 MTNL-AP – Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. and AS 18101 RIL-IDC – Reliance Infocom Ltd Internet Data Centre

We will examine Festi more in later blog posts.

-jsq

Almost… FortressITX zero spam for one day then up in SpamRankings.net

AS 25653 FortressITX went to zero for one day, 15 May, in the May 2012  U.S. SpamRankings.net, but bounded back up to more than 294,000 spam messages a day a week later, placing #6 for the month as a whole.

This was the second time FortressITX made the U.S. top 10. It had been #9 in March, but had dropped out of the April 2012 U.S. rankings. And yes, it’s snowshoe spam. That ASN does show a few other problems, also not botnets.

-jsq

Stone Internet Services’ AS 39234 dropped like a rock in May 2012 SpamRankings.net

Some good news for Belgium! Stone Internet Services’ AS 39234 decreased spamming by 95% in May 2012, dropping from 8,212 on May Day to 321 on 28 May.

In the other direction, Brutele’s AS 12392 went from 2,220 on 3 May to 6,207 on 30 May, an increase of 279%.

And Uganda Telecom’s AS 21491 started up like a rocket at the end of the month, going from 1,046 on 26 May to 4,213 on 31 May, a 300% increase.

Now all these numbers are just samples by CBL, hints and whispers of the total amount of spam flying around the net. But when the curves move that fast, usually something is going on.

-jsq

Microsoft, world leader in Internet security: and spamming?

Microsoft, world leader in Internet security, will doubtless clean up its spamming act when it sees its AS 8075 is #1 for outbound spam in the U.S. for April 2012 in rankings from PSBL data, pushing the U.S. to #1 worldwide. Other rankings don’t show Microsoft high, but does MSFT really want to show up in any of these rankings?

Rank (Previous)CountryPopulationSpam
Volume		Percent
of top 10
1 (3) US 310,232,863 673,30618.2%
2 (2) IN 1,173,108,018 506,39713.7%
3 (1) CN 1,330,044,000 413,08911.2%
    Total   3,689,376100%

These rankings that show Microsoft high are derived by SpamRankings.net from PSBL blocklist data. The April 2012 SpamRankings.net from CBL blocklist data do not show Microsoft in the top 10. Apparently PSBL’s spam traps happened to be in the line of spam from Microsoft, while CBL’s were not.

And of course Microsoft probably doesn’t mean to be sending any of that spam. More likely botnets exploited a MSFT security vulnerability. Here’s hoping they clean it up soon!

-jsq

What other ASNs were affected by botnet Ogee in February 2012?

Previously we determined that nine ASNs that showed spam surges in the U.S. and Canadian top 10 SpamRankings.net for February 2012 were infested by the botnet Ogee and that spam came from that botnet. What other ASNs were affected by Ogee in the same time period?

Let’s look at the top 10 ASNs infested by Ogee according to spam volume for 1 Feb 2012 to 12 Mar 2012:


Left Axis: Total Ogee volume (spam messages);
Right Axis: top 10 Ogee ASN volume (dotted curves)

It looks like Ogee is a new botnet, since all these top 10 ASNs came up from zero volume before 18 February 2012. The biggest initial peak in this graph is from AS 21788 NOC, #1 in the U.S. February top 10, and the biggest late surge is from AS 10439 CARINET, #8 in that same ranking. Right below CARINET is AS 32613 IWEB-AS, Canadian February #1. The rest of the 8 Ogee-infested from the U.S. top 10 previously described also are in there, except AS 7796 ATMLINK and AS 13768 PEER1.

New here are these three: Continue reading →

Did the February 2012 spam surge come from one botnet?

SpamRankings.net saw
AS 21788NOC
AS 27229WEBHOST-ASN1
AS 46475LIMESTONENETWORKS
AS 33055BCC-65-182-96-0-PHX
AS 15149EZZI-101-BGP
AS 13768PEER1
AS 10439CARINET
AS 7796ATMLINK
a huge surge in spam from some U.S. ASNs, mostly from ones that hadn’t even been in the top 10 before, with possible correlations in one ASN each from Peru and Canada. Did all this spam come from the same botnet?

Maybe not all, but most. Eight out of the U.S. top 10 for February show very close correlation with one botnet, Ogee. They are listed in the table on the right and shown in the chart below:


Left Axis: ASN volume (spam messages); Right Axis: Botnet volume (dotted curves)

The chart also shows some ASNs reacted quickly and stopped the spamming, while others got worse. It’s a busy chart, so let’s look at simpler charts for one example each of resilient and susceptible ASNs.

AS 21788 NOC was one of the first and worst affected by this spam surge: Continue reading →

Is January’s medical spam caused by botnets?

Remember those three spamming medical organizations PSBL saw and the spike from CSHS that SpamRankings.net found in CBL data? Digging into the underlying data, and graphing them all on the same chart, we see this:

Even though the three three-digit-spamming medicos spam oddly coherently, we don’t find any botnets for them. This may be because most of that spam was seen by PSBL, and our botnet assignments come from CBL. CBL didn’t see any spam from those ASNs, so it didn’t have anything to assign for botnets. Maybe they’re infested by the same botnet; maybe not; can’t tell.

But it was CBL that saw that big spam spike for AS 22328 CSHS. And CBL did assign a botnet to that: Lethic. For all but two days of CSHS spam shown, CBL assigned Lethic to the total amount of spam from CSHS for that day. That may be because all that CSHS spam is coming from a single computer.

Of course, CBL’s botnet assignments are not perfect, but infosec professionals tell me CBL is about as good as it gets for that, so there’s a good chance this botnet assignment is correct.

The good news is that all of the trio of three-digit spamming medicos decreased their spam and even went to zero during the period shown.

And CSHS spam peaked at the end of January and started back down in February.

Pretty soon there may be once again little or no spam from medical organizations to rank.

-jsq

Global Crossing spam spike, November 2011

In the November SpamRankings.net from PSBL data, Global Crossing’s AS 3549 GBLX spiked on 17 November and a few days before, pushing it into fifth place.

Did this spam spike come from any particular botnet?


AS 3549 GBLX PSBL spam volume left axis, CBL botnet volume right axis
It looks like GBLX is infested with many botnets, but the spike on 17 Nov roughly corresponds with a cutwail botnet volume peak on 16 Nov. Given that the ASN volume spike is from PSBL data and the botnet volume peak is from CBL data, a day off is plausible, due to different collection and delivery times.

There’s also a peak for grum (green line near the bottom) on 17 Nov, and peaks for festi and n/a on 18 Nov, where n/a is CBL’s marker for spam they detected without having to look as far as determining which botnet they think sent it.

So the spam spike could be from cutwail. Or it could be because of a coincidence of several botnet peaks. Or it could be some other botnet that happened to do a spam campaign on that day. Given that the PSBL GBLX peak builds up on 16 Nov, I’d guess it came mostly from cutwail.

We could try to resolve this question by digging into the specific addresses the GBLX spam PSBL saw came from and see if they match addresses CBL assigned to botnets.

-jsq