Have you noticed less spam in your inbox today? Maybe not, but you can rest assured that less will be coming your way soon, thanks to the takedown of something called the Rustock botnet, one of the world’s most active spam-generators.
The takedown seems to have been the work of “anti-spam activists,” with the amount of spam emails being sent going from two thousand emails per second to an estimated two emails per second. Acording to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks in Atlanta, traffic from the network just disappeared:
This looks like a widespread campaign to have either these [internet addresses] null-routed or the abuse contacts at various ISPs have shut them down uniformly. It looks to me that someone has gone and methodically tracked these [addresses] and had them taken out one way or another.
As the Krebs on Security website explains, it’s too early to celebrate the end of spam just yet – the machines infected with Rustock are still infected, after all – and one quick look at my inbox reveals that there’s still a lot of spam out there. But isn’t it good to know that someone is out there, trying to do something about it?
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