Microsoft has overcome Rustock botnet

The other day there was a good (well, or maybe bad for someone) news that Microsoft was able to close one of the world's largest botnets, Rustock, which generates 39% of the global spam traffic. Of course, this is a multi-profile botnet, like many others, but 39% of spam is still not children's toys. According to experts from Microsoft, the botnet consisted of 2 million infected machines at the peak of its development.

All these millions of machines generated about 30 billion spam messages daily. Agree, this is a huge amount of spam, which is so unloved by many of us. The struggle of corporation specialists with the Rustock botnet is not particularly different from the usual methods of dealing with botnets. First, the master servers were identified, with which the attackers sent commands to the botnet machines. Then, Rustock servers located in the United States were withdrawn for further analysis, after which Microsoft contacted law enforcement officers from other countries to eliminate Rustock command servers in these countries.
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After blocking the most part (according to Microsoft - almost all) of these servers, the operation began to eliminate malicious software on infected PCs that make up the botnet. This stage, apparently, was successful, because Rustock actually ceased to exist. By the way, this is one of the largest operations conducted jointly by the Microsoft Malware Protection Center with Trustworthy Computing and law enforcement agencies in various countries. The whole operation received the stupid name Operation b107.

In their appeal to the “people,” the corporation's specialists ask those users who suspect that their PCs are infected to get more information here . Hopefully, this whole struggle really bore fruit, and the botnet went offline forever, and not for a couple of days, as often happens.

Via DVICE