When McColo, an ISP known for being a haven for spammers and scammers was knocked offline two weeks ago, the notorious Srizbi Botnet went down with it. This resulted in global spam volume plummeting by as much as 75%. Sadly, that’s about to change. FireEye, a threat research firm, has discovered that Srizbi is rising from the dead.

Researchers at the firm have discovered that Srizbi has begun updating all of its bots via its new command servers located in Estonia. New domains linked to the botnet have been found as well, with registrations located in Russia.

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Botnet researchers believe that the Storm botnet may be dead. It’s been a month since it last sent any spam, which is very unusual for a botnet. The only activity researchers have detected is that of some Storm-infected machines contacting one another and the host machines appear to be turning away any that try to connect to them. Since every minute of non-activity costs them money, it’s likely the massive botnet has been abandoned by its creators-possibly for another, more powerful one. Storm is made up of about 47,000 infected PCs.

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