Friday, March 25, 2011
Microsoft and feds bring down spam giant Rustock
I'm sure there are bigger things on our minds; however, the less email spam, the better...
Jat Greene recently reported at news.CNET.com:
"Rustock, purveyor of more e-mail spam than any other network in the world, was felled last week by Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents.
A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company's request late today triggered several coordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network.
'This botnet is estimated to have approximately a million infected computers operating under its control and has been known to be capable of sending billions of spam mails every day,' Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post today.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that it was Microsoft's digital crimes unit, working in concert with U.S. marshals, that raided seven hosting facilities across the country and seized the command-and-control machines that ran the network. Those are the servers that send instructions to the fleet of infected computers to dish out spam messages hawking such items as phony lottery scams and fake and potentially dangerous prescription drugs.The takedown was known internally as Operation b107."
