Spam Volumes Take a Major Drop After Botnet Taken Down

One of the worlds largest spam botnets was taken down by what appears to be action of Microsoft working with legal authorities. The Rustock Botnet is estimated to have infected 815,000 Windows based machines over the years, each of which sends out junk messages on a regular basis.

On a normal operating day, Rustock pushes out about one to two thousand emails per second although suddenly, at 2.45pm GMT, this suddenly dropped to just one or two emails per second which we don’t have to point out is a huge decrease.

Rustock has a number of command and control servers that use the botnets to make the spam attacks. As of yesterday, these all stopped operating (or at least the ones that were being monitored).

Although this is good news for all but the people that control the emails, or have some financial involvement, we don’t expect it will be too long before another network rises in its place as new ways to spam and send out junk mail are always being found.

KrebonSecurity has more details of what happened and does mention that although the command and control servers are not responding, there are still 815,000 or more Windows PCs out there that are still infected with Rustock. All that is required is that they just contact those machines another way and they will fire back up.