Last week a group of researchers announced that Grum which was the third largest botnet on the planet had been taken down by blocking the botnet’s command and control servers in both the Netherlands and Panama. What does this mean for you? It means that 18% – as much as 50% of the world’s spam volume has just disappeared.
Excellent!
However the people who run this botnet were able to briefly bring it back up before it was shut down again. It’s likely not to stay down, though bringing it back may be a problem:
“It’s not about creating a new server. They’d have to start an entirely new campaign and infect hundreds of thousands of new machines to get something like Grum started again,” said Atif Mushtaq, a computer security specialist at FireEye.”They’d have to build from scratch. Because of how the malware was written for Grum, when the master server is dead, the infected machines can no longer send spam or communicate with a new server.”
So this is a win. But it may only be a short lived one before the mayhem starts again. So enjoy the reprieve from spam while it lasts.
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This entry was posted on July 22, 2012 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Botnet, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Third Largest Botnet Taken Down… Less Spam For You… For Now….
Last week a group of researchers announced that Grum which was the third largest botnet on the planet had been taken down by blocking the botnet’s command and control servers in both the Netherlands and Panama. What does this mean for you? It means that 18% – as much as 50% of the world’s spam volume has just disappeared.
Excellent!
However the people who run this botnet were able to briefly bring it back up before it was shut down again. It’s likely not to stay down, though bringing it back may be a problem:
“It’s not about creating a new server. They’d have to start an entirely new campaign and infect hundreds of thousands of new machines to get something like Grum started again,” said Atif Mushtaq, a computer security specialist at FireEye.”They’d have to build from scratch. Because of how the malware was written for Grum, when the master server is dead, the infected machines can no longer send spam or communicate with a new server.”
So this is a win. But it may only be a short lived one before the mayhem starts again. So enjoy the reprieve from spam while it lasts.
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Like this:
Related
This entry was posted on July 22, 2012 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Botnet, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.