Microsoft swoop shuts down the biggest spam provider on the Internet
The infected computers pump out all the garbage and the owners do not even know it's going on. Now Microsoft has taken an axe to the world's biggest spam operation. Not to mince words, they say they've "decapitated "it.
A civil lawsuit had been filed by Microsoft in court in Seattle last month against operators - who were unnamed - of the Rustock "botnet," said to be a huge international network of computers for delivering spam.
The network is now believed to have been closed down or as Microsoft put it put it more graphically - "decapitated ". Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in Microsoft's digital crimes unit said of their action , "We think this has been 100% effective."
Security firm Symantec had described the Rustock botnet as the largest source of spam in the world at the end of last year, accounting for nearly half of all spam. Their messages sold everything from counterfeit software to pharmaceuticals such as Viagra. This week's coup was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. U.S. marshals and employees of Microsoft's digital crimes unit went to Internet hosting facilities in seven states armed with an order allowing them to seize computers said to be "command-and-control" machines.
The "command-and-control" machines enabled the botnet operators to broadcast instructions to infected computers - believed to be more than one million machines world-wide. After their raids on Wednesday, Microsoft executives said they had dealt a deadly blow to the botnet and on Thursday asked a judge to unseal details of the lawsuit. Microsoft doesn't allege in its lawsuit that the internet hosting companies knew that machines within their facilities were being used as part of Rustock. The infected computers are usually owned by people who have no idea their machines are being used for spam. The operators of the botnet aren't yet known.
Symantec said in a blog post that Rustock ceased sending spam at around 11:30 am US eastern time on Wednesday, according to its junk email measurements. In a blog post on Microsoft's site, Mr Boscovich said, "With help from the upstream providers, we successfully severed the IP addresses that controlled the botnet, cutting off communication and disabling it. "This case and this operation are ongoing and our investigators are now inspecting the evidence gathered from the seizures to learn what we can about the botnet's operations."