SPAM Briefly Drops 38% Due To Real Host Shutdown
MessageLabs wrote a nice report summarizing key events from August and it turns out our work was more widely felt than believed. Apparently part of Cutwail’s C&C infrastructure resided inside Real Host’s network. When they got cut off, SPAM levels dropped but only briefly since there were more C&Cs elsewhere to pick up the slack.
Here’s an excerpt from the report, to bad they didn’t credit our work 
“Real Host was disconnected by its upstream providers on 1 August 2009. The impact was immediately felt, as can be seen in Figure 1, where spam volumes dropped briefly by as much as 38% in the subsequent 48-hour period.
Much of this spam was linked to the Cutwail botnet, currently one of the largest botnets and responsible for approximately 15-20% of all spam. Its activity levels fell by as much as 90% when Real Host was taken offline, but quickly recovered in a matter of days.”
