Spam is back

At the beginning of the month, I ran an article talking about the reduction in the level of spam over the holidays this year. The news outlets are now reporting that the spam level is back to the pre-holiday levels.

The drop in spam volume is attributed to a botnet army known as Rustock going offline. Apparently it came back online on Sunday, January 12, 2011.
From the NY Times report:

The volume of spam sent by Rustock on Monday — estimated to total 19 billion messages, or approximately 28 percent of all spam — suggests that the botnet will persevere as the largest source of global spam. A smaller compatriot botnet Xarvester, which also took a vacation from spam, also resumed business on Monday, said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, a unit of Symantec. The Lethic botnet remained dark, he said. Rustock is sending about 100,000 to 200,000 spam e-mails per second.

So, while it looked promising for a while that maybe spam was on the decline, it appears to have been a false hope, and we're back to full mailboxes.