Microsoft takes down Rustock, reduces world spam by 39%
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world’s largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft’s wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis, and worked with police in the Netherlands to disable some of the command structure outside of the U.S.
With the immediate threat disabled, Microsoft then worked with upstream providers to black hole the IP addresses of whoever was controlling the botnet. To prevent further master controllers popping up, Microsoft worked with Chinese CN-CERT to block registration of domains that could be used by new command and control servers. Finally, Microsoft is now working with ISPs and CERTs around the world to help clean the Rustock malware from around 1 million infected machines. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft didn’t do this alone; specialists from Pfizer, FireEye (the company behind the Mega-D botnet takedown), and the University of Washington helped out.
Source: Techamok
Comments(26)
Now, if someone could take down the noreply@blizzard.com spambots, that would make my day.
i’m agree with you crypto
LOL @ 1 million infected PC’s. That’s 1 million confirmed computer idiots.
i thought world’s largest spam bot was Srizbi, a bot who spams 50% of all spam worldwide, and uses 300 000 zombies to do it.
@NeRD
Epic
wat will i do with all the microsoft hate now
Heh…
Microsoft ain’t that bad after all…
some will go, some will stay…
39% my ass. This won’t even put a dent in spam.
Anyone know how Pfizer was involved? Seems like a strange company to be involved in stopping internet spam.
Pfizer spam for viagra is almost half of the spam load in the world.
Pfizer — a LOT of the spam was for counterfeit versions of their products, e.g. Viagra. Stopping these adverts helps to protect both their brands as well as (they hope) sales for their products which would have otherwise gone on these fakes.
Or so the theory goes…
why dont the ad company’s simply cut these accounts off if they are spamming. if someone is spamming millions of emails with links to cheap viagra i’m sure they have a method to track the affiliate id otherwise how do they know who to pay?
Now let’s all send a thank you e-mail to Microsoft \o/
Less zombie networks = less DDoS attacks, but that’s only relative to the size of the network it’s being aimed at.
12# Its not the ad companies but the rules towards the ISP’s who lets stupid mail servers send through their networks – they are the ones to blame for even letting it through atleast thats how it is in my country, where the biggest ISP is almost the only one with blacklisted servers and lots of them
Thank you Microsoft. For this act of kindness I am willing to retraced all the negative things I’ve said about you.
Thank u M$. but don’t stop the software piracy, i lot like ur W7, but i forgot to pay 4 it.
DAMN! I just got a new black girlfriend, and need to enlarge my penis ASAP!
I just got a new girlfriend that had a black boyfriend and I really need to enlarge my penis ASAP!
I just got a new small penis and need to enlarge it ASAP!
@LiTTlEbiLLy: I forgive you.
Thank u Billy G
Thank u Billy G
eat d1ck everyone…
Pfizer?! …oh, heh, heh. Yeah, I guess I can see how they might have a vested interest.
In which scrambler did you throw your numbers before publishing them? You might want to check your sources again and better.