Dutch Police Takedown C&Cs Used By Grum Botnet

wiredmikey writes "Dutch authorities have pulled the plug on two secondary servers used by the Grum botnet, a large botnet said to produce about 17% of the world's spam. According to researchers from FireEye, the backup C&C servers were located in the Netherlands, and once word of their existence was released, Dutch authorities quickly seized them. While any C&C server takedown is a win, the impact may be minimal, as the two primary servers are fully active, and the datacenters hosting them are unresponsive to fully documented abuse reports. That being said, FireEye's Atif Mushtaq noted that the botnet does has some weak spots, including the fact that Grum has no failback mechanism, has just a few IPs hardcoded into the binaries, and the botnet is divided into small segments, so even if some C&Cs are not taken down, part of botnet can still remain offline. The removal of the C&C servers shines light on how quickly some law enforcement agencies work, given that proof of their existence is just over a week old."

Comments

The Dutch police have takedown C&Cs now?

[Baloroth]

This may come across as pedantic, but I honestly thought that, since "takedown" is a noun, the Dutch police had takedown C&Cs that were being used by the Grum botnet (because that is what the damned headline says, so I think my confusion is understandable). "Take down", the verb, is two words, not one, and what you meant to use.

Yes, Slashdot, grammar does matter, when you try to use a noun as a verb (which it cannot be used as). And I can understand not editing the summary (who wants to do work, after all?) but the headline? Really?