If you hate seeing those male enhancing and other medicine related spam emails in your inbox day after day, well, there is good news. Microsoft made a statement earlier and claimed responsibility for taking down the massive botnet known as Rustock.
Rustock stopped sending out emails on the morning of March 16.. This is great news and wonderful victory against email spam. Rustock is said be one of the biggest botnets and is responsible of 48% of all email spam sent out in 2010.
Yesterday, Richard Boscovich, senior attorney with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, stated the following.
“This operation, known as Operation b107, is the second high-profile takedown in Microsoft’s joint effort between DCU, Microsoft Malware Protection Center and Trustworthy Computing—known as Project MARS (Microsoft Active Response for Security),”
“The Rustock botnet was officially taken offline yesterday, after a months-long investigation by DCU and our partners, successful pleading before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, and a coordinated seizure of command and control servers in multiple hosting locations escorted by the U.S. Marshals Service.”
Microsoft helped all the victims to gain control back of their infected computers from Rustock by blocking access to the spammers. It is estimated Rustock had taken over 1.1 to 1.7 million PCs.
Great news for everyone who uses email on a daily basis and let’s hope we start seeing less and less of those annoying Viagra ads.
