Superbotnets: Mega-D vs Storm, an in-depth look

Mega-D, set off a firestorm of speculation, recently. What family of malware was behind this previously unknown botnet? How had it emerged to challenge Storm with hardly a mention in any research articles or press?

Based on spam samples provided by [security vendor] Marshal, we looked for unique patterns in the message headers, and began to filter traffic across our own monitored customer base to reveal source IPs trying to send spam to our clients.

Based on the number of bots connecting to mail servers we monitor, we estimate that Mega-D consists of around 35,000 infected machines worldwide. This is a very strong botnet, but hardly a challenger to Storm. Even though Storm has waned to around 85,000 bots, it still holds far more spamming capacity.

A sample of a typical spam email sent by Mega-D is shown here:

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