Festi botnet


The Festi botnet, also known by its alias of Spamnost, is a botnet mostly involved in email spam and denial of service attacks.

History and operations

The Festi botnet was first discovered around Autumn 2009. At this time it was estimated that the botnet itself consisted of roughly infected machines, while having a spam volume capacity of roughly 2.5 billion spam emails a day. More recent estimates - dated August 2012 - display that the botnet is sending spam from unique IP addresses, a quarter of the total amount of 1 million detected IP's sending spam mails. Besides being capable of sending email spam, research into the Festi botnet demonstrated that it is also capable of performing denial of service attacks.