Largest botnet smashed
By Pulkit Sharma

One of the biggest spam operations in history was shutdown this week.

Security guru Brian Krebs, who worked as a reporter for The Washington Post from 1995 to 2009, has blogged about one of the biggest successes against one of the most prolific spam machines in the world

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For years, Rustock has been the most prolific purveyor of spam — mainly junk messages touting online pharmacies and male enhancement pills. But late Wednesday morning Eastern Time, dozens of Internet servers used to coordinate these spam campaigns ceased operating, apparently almost simultaneously.

Such an action suggests that anti-spam activists have succeeded in executing possibly the largest botnet takedown in the history of the Internet. Spam data compiled by the Composite Spam Blocklist, the entity that monitors global junk e-mail volumes for the anti-spam outfit Spamhaus.org, shows that at around 2:45 p.m. GMT (10:45 a.m. EDT) spam sent via the Rustock botnet virtually disappeared. The CBL estimates that at least 815,000 Windows computers are currently infected with Rustock, although that number is more than likely a conservative estimate.

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