Spam Drops 1/3 After Rustock Botnet Gets Crushed

wiredmikey writes "The Rustock Botnet was sending as many as 13.82 billion spam emails each day before being taken down early this month by an effort headed by Microsoft in cooperation with authorities and the legal system. According to Symantec's March 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, the Rustock botnet had been responsible for an average of 28.5% of global spam sent from all botnets in March. Following the takedown, when the Rustock botnet was no longer cranking out spam by the billions, global spam volumes fell by one-third. For reference, toward the end of 2010, Rustock had been responsible for as much as 47.5% of all spam, sending approximately 44.1 billion e-mails per day, according to MessageLabs stats. Since then, Bagle, a botnet that wasn't even on MessageLabs' top ten spam-sending botnets at the end of 2010, has taken over from Rustock as the most active spam-sending botnet this year."

Comments

Impressive

[disopaos]

It's really impressive Microsoft was able to do this. They've dropped 33% of the worlds spam and they did it all alone. Microsoft deserves kudos to this. Good job MS!

Re:Impressive

[Evtim]

Excellent! So they can drop all attempts to regulate the bandwidth. After all we just got 30% wider pipe, did we not?

For those oh so bandwidth hungry mobile devices......

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Which unrootable OS do you run?

Re:Impressive

[postbigbang]

Microsoft's operating system architecture allowed users to have admin privileges, among other architectural mistakes. Defaults were made so that HTML rendering was done by default, as well. Many users were infected because of incompetence-- not by sheer numbers.

FOSS coders have the same loathing for spam and lack of prosecution that other coders do. That Microsoft has taken down a botnet is laudable. Others ought to join in, too. But first, perhaps online email services ought to acknowledge the role the play in allowing spammers to do their work. Microsoft is one of the good guys here, acknowledging abuse complaints quickly, but others like AOL and Yahoo, don't even acknowledge a complaint, let alone act on them.

Botnets are one part of the problem, but even users trying to do their very best get infected. It's less so than before XP SP2+ editions, but there are very few non-Microsoft botnet members out there. Think about that.

Re:Impressive

[cpghost]

Since most of those botnet machines are running MS, I'd say, it's about time MS became involved in the fight against spam. The delivery mechanism for all this spam wouldn't exist if it weren't for Microsoft's poor record at building a somewhat secure operating system.

Who cares

[afidel]

The organized criminals who are raking in the money are well protected in their home countries so this is essentially a big game of whack a mole until people better protect their computers (good luck with that).

Not for long...

[damn_registrars]

Sure the spam volume dropped, but anyone who thinks this is anything but temporary is either crazy or an idiot. Naturally as soon as one botnet goes down another one ramps up to take its place; this is exactly what the prime motivating factor behind spam - money - will do to the situation.