Botnet 'goes to sleep at night'

Security researchers have found that one of the biggest 'botnets' (armies of infected computers) takes an eight-hour break every day. Most botnets churn out spam around the clock but Rustock has predictable patterns and shuts down at OOOOBST, resuming its activities at 0800BST the following morning. Rustock is estimated to consist of between 1.3 million and 1.9 million infected PCs, and is responsible for around 10 per cent of all spam emails.

www.messagelabs.co.uk