Following the FTC and New Zealand government’s successful indictment of the HerbalKing spam ring on 14th October, it appears that there has been no discernible reduction in the mount of spam being filtered by leading Internet anti spam filtering services.
Anti spam filtering services and anti virus services report that their filters continue to stop the same levels of spam as before the indictment, suggesting that simply prosecuting so called spam gangs alone, is not an effective solution.It may be that the continuation of spam levels may be as a result of the tens of thousands of HerbalKing zombied computers on the Internet being configured to send their queue of spam messages regardless of whether the HerbalKing servers are running or not.
If this is the case, we may possibly see a resulting reduction in spam levels in due course as theses zombies are either patched with anti virus tools or exhaust their existing spam message queues. As we have said before, we will continue to monitor this story and post updates here.
