Researchers Take Down a Spam Botnet 207
The Register is reporting on the takedown of a botnet once responsible for 1/3 of the world's spam. The deed was done by researchers from the security firm FireEye, who detailed the action in a series of blog posts. PC World's coverage estimates that lately the botnet has accounted for 4% of spam. From the Register: "After carefully analyzing the machinations of the massive botnet, alternately known as Mega-D and Ozdok, the FireEye employees last week launched a coordinated blitz on dozens of its command and control channels. ... Almost immediately, the spam stopped, according to M86 Security blog. ... The body blow is good news to ISPs that are forced to choke on the torrent of spam sent out by the pesky botnet. But because many email servers already deployed blacklists that filtered emails sent from IP addresses known to be used by Ozdok, end users may not notice much of a change. ... With [the] head chopped off of Ozdok, more than 264,000 IP addresses were found reporting to sinkholes under FireEye's control..."
Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)
Now I don't have to worry about throttled torrent downloads.
Uh right, problem solved there. In other news, once you get an oil change in your car you no longer have to rotate the tires.
A little known fact about security firm "FireEye" (Score:3, Funny)
At company picnics, employees are encouraged to take part in "Whack-a-mole" competitions during summertime, and ice sculpting during the winter.
Re:All your SPAMbot are belong to us (Score:3, Funny)
Since the bots all deserve to be botted, I might set up a beowulf cluster with them and distributed render Big Buck Bunny for the fun of it. =)
Re:Wrong title, not 'taken down' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Funny)
Because its actually the government who creates and controls these 'botnets'. They're used to spy on us since they have a computer on each end of each router meaning they can reliably trace data streams in foreign countries to their true original source.
Ok, so that wasn't necessarily accurate. But, I've heard on the low-down that the fellows who were working on Titan Rain are currently trying to map the Chinese governments botnet across the world. Its funny that a growing proportion of our electronics are being sorced from China.
Nothing against the Chinese - great guys and I love mandarin. Just some actions of their leaders seem a bit 'off base' - outside my comfort zone.
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Funny)