After a ‘temporary peace’ given for the time of the festive days spam volumes returned to their normal levels doubling over just 24 hours globally. As reported by MessageLabs the Rustock botnet is now out of hibernation and working at its full capacity sending tons of useless junk mail messages from hundreds of thousands of compromised Windows machines.

Specialized in spamvertising unlicensed pharmaceutical websites Rustock is the biggest single source of global spam. Monday on January 10 the Rustock’s return to its normal operation resulted in doubled global junk mail volumes which is 98% increase over the course of only 24 hours, says MessageLabs.

But that is not all good cyber crime news for today. Other botnets have also come back from their winter vacations. Thus, the Xarvester botnet has also woken up after a pause on its command and control servers.

MessageLabs along with other security watchers are unaware of the reasons of the Christmas “armistice”. Among some suppositions is the usual Christmas-through-New-Year vacations so common at the territory of the former Soviet Union, and as such orchestrators of the botnets were attacking vodka instead.