Festi botnet appears

There's a new botnet in town. Known as Festi, the network of zombie computers now is responsible for three to six percent of daily spam, or about 1.5 to three billion emails, according to the latest MessageLabs research released Thursday. The botnet, which was responsible for virtually no spam as recent as August, has managed to increase its output by recruiting new zombie computers and delivering significantly more spam from each compromised node. The junk mail typically pushes goods, such as male enhancement pills and jewelery. -- DK