Spam Drops 1/3 After Rustock Botnet Gets Crushed

wiredmikey writes "The Rustock Botnet was sending as many as 13.82 billion spam emails each day before being taken down early this month by an effort headed by Microsoft in cooperation with authorities and the legal system. According to Symantec's March 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, the Rustock botnet had been responsible for an average of 28.5% of global spam sent from all botnets in March. Following the takedown, when the Rustock botnet was no longer cranking out spam by the billions, global spam volumes fell by one-third. For reference, toward the end of 2010, Rustock had been responsible for as much as 47.5% of all spam, sending approximately 44.1 billion e-mails per day, according to MessageLabs stats. Since then, Bagle, a botnet that wasn't even on MessageLabs' top ten spam-sending botnets at the end of 2010, has taken over from Rustock as the most active spam-sending botnet this year."

Re:Impressive

[Joce640k]

"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time" - Bill Gates, 24 January 2004.

ZEUS Tracker can help you then & here's how

[Anonymous Coward]

ZEUS TRACKER:

https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/monitor.php?filter=online [abuse.ch]

Add what's in there hostname-domain/subdomain name-wise into your HOSTS file, and zeus can't touch you, because you stop access to ANY of its botnet's servers or enslaved zombies.

(And, when you get IP Addresses in there rather than URL's as 99% of them are, add them in as a new firewall rule that denies access to them (either in your software based firewall OR router)).

APK

P.S.=> It works. It's what I do for myself, family, & friends until ZEUS (& other bots like SpyEye which also has such a tracker of its command & control, dropzone, etc. servers also) is "taken down", which is probably only a matter of time... apk

Re:Who cares

[_|()|\|]

this is essentially a big game of whack a mole

The last couple of times a story like this was posted, I went straight to SpamCop's statistics [spamcop.net] for corroboration. You're right: the touted decrease in spam is real, but temporary. However, the yearly chart does seem to show a downward trend.

Can't Fix Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, MS is a highly secure OS. It is the users that are not secure. I have hundred of windows servers and been running them for years on the internet. So have many others. They don't turn into zombies. I have had several PC's, all windows none of them zombies. I have a sister who has to have every toolbar she comes across and any free software that tells her the weather or what ever. She turns a PC into a zombie in usually a weeks time. I have a neighbor, running a mac, little old lady. Found hers to be running as a zombie. Have a niece and a nephew that are constantly downloading torrents and things, all their PC's zombies. The more amazing thing, you can tell them they are zombie and explain it to them, they just don't care.

So you really need to put the blame though where it deserves users. While we are at it, I am hoping all the windows user do go buy macs. I will let you have those users all you want.