Dutch Police Takedown C&Cs Used By Grum Botnet 45
wiredmikey writes "Dutch authorities have pulled the plug on two secondary servers used by the Grum botnet, a large botnet said to produce about 17% of the world's spam. According to researchers from FireEye, the backup C&C servers were located in the Netherlands, and once word of their existence was released, Dutch authorities quickly seized them. While any C&C server takedown is a win, the impact may be minimal, as the two primary servers are fully active, and the datacenters hosting them are unresponsive to fully documented abuse reports. That being said, FireEye's Atif Mushtaq noted that the botnet does has some weak spots, including the fact that Grum has no failback mechanism, has just a few IPs hardcoded into the binaries, and the botnet is divided into small segments, so even if some C&Cs are not taken down, part of botnet can still remain offline. The removal of the C&C servers shines light on how quickly some law enforcement agencies work, given that proof of their existence is just over a week old."
Re:DUTCH ARE ALWAYS TOO ROLLING STONED !! (Score:5, Funny)
The quality of first post trolls has really decreased in the last few years.
Re:how about kicking infected machines offline? (Score:4, Funny)
2. It's packet filtering (a firewall dropping all packets).
3. Yay, more laws! Let's just ignore the places where it will directly contradict existing laws.
4. Because the non-solution doesn't stop spam via. open relays.
6. Profit is a motivation for finding workaround or other methods.
8. Oh, your University did it so it must be a great idea for the entire Internet? Gotcha.
9. You are again missing the point.
10. Yes it is.
11. I do not trust my ISP to not fuck up something as complex as detecting a remote malware infected server and firewalling it effectively.
In short: you're wrong.