Authorities Shut Down Major Spam Ring - NYTimes.com: "“This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.
The investigation provides a clear window into the business of modern spam, which by some estimates accounts for 90 percent of all e-mail sent over the Internet.
To pepper Internet users with its solicitations, the HerbalKing group used a botnet, a global network of computers infected with malicious software, often without the knowledge of their owners.
The security firm Marshal Software, which assisted the F.T.C. with the investigation, estimated in court documents that the group’s Mega-D botnet — named after one of its pill products — was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. In January, the botnet was the leading source of spam on the Internet, the firm estimated."