Spam drops as Microsoft takes down large Rustock Botnet

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on ... otnet.aspx

The Microsoft led initiative by the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit is known as Operation b107, formerly Operation b49 which had taken down the Waledac botnet.

I have read around and some claims say as much as 39% of spam has dropped in the last few days, although I am not sure its quite that high. The M86 Security Labs company tracks spam botnets and according to them it looked like at one point The Rustock Botnet may have been responsible for about 60% of spam when it hit its peak last year, in 2010. Since it was shutdown a few days ago it looks like spam levels from the Rustock Botnet were closer to around 5% to 10%. That is still a great achievement, and it looks like they are starting to figure out how to go after these botnets and take them down.

You can learn more about how the Rustock Botnet works here:

http://www.m86security.com/labs/spambot ... rticle=902



According to that article each infected machine can send 25,000 messages per hour, and estimates according to Wikipidea that anywhere from 150,000 to 2,400,000 machines had been infected and part of the Ruststock Botnet network. Just doing the math you can see that is a great deal of spam!

This is another interesting page which shows how spam has dropped over the last year:

http://www.m86security.com/labs/spam_statistics.asp

India tops the list as the country that sends out the most Spam, followed closely by Russia.

I was reading that on Slashdot last night and was too tired to post it, but I thought that was great!

I'm not a Microsoft fan, but it's impressive that they were able to take down such a complex botnet. A World Wide Web with a little less spam is always a good thing.

avg(150000, 2400000) = 1,275,000 computers

1,275,000 computers * 25,000 messages = 31,875,000,000 messages per hour

31,875,000,000 messages * 24 hours = 765,000,000,000 messages per day.

765 BILLION messages per day.

Yikes!

Spork that is some math there but calculate how many computers that are internet enabled mind you we just ran out of ip's so these networks have a lot to cover.

That is just good news for me i get them penis emails every day or 2, i have 1000's in my email box of spam from everywhere and the forum bots are the worst of all. Good to see more spam networks taken down that means less traffic they are chewing up on our servers.

But god dam that is a lot of spam

Wow... 765 BILLION a day? That is absolutely unreal, even though spam presumably has low yields (who seriously falls for it these days?), they must have been making a fortune with a botnet like that.