Security
researchers said they dismantled the world's No. 3 spam botnet after convincing
the companies that hosted its command and control servers to pull the plug on
the operation.
Atif
Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye, said in a blog
post that the botnet known as Grum drew its last dying breath on
Wednesday, after six servers in Ukraine and one in Russia were shut down. In a
tense faceoff with whitehats, the botnet operators had deployed those servers
following the disconnection earlier this week of separate servers in the
Netherlands and Panama. Faced with the threat of losing a 100,000-computer
network that generated an estimated 18 billion spam messages a day, the Grum
operators were desperately trying to transition to those machines when they
stopped working.
Responsible
for about 18 percent of the world's junk messages, Grum was ranked as the No. 3
source of spam.
Reference:-
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57475328-83/experts-take-down-grum-spam-botnet-worlds-third-largest/