Generic spam picture.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit together with Pfizer, FireEye and the University of Washington have managed to bring down the world’s (currently) largest spam network, Rustock.
Rustock was a botnet consisting of approximately one million zombie systems which together were capable of sending out 30 billion spam emails per day – accounting for 39% of global spam messages. The nature of the emails they were sending was mostly pharmaceutical, making them extremely dangerous for naive internet users. So while it’s awesome that we’ll receive less spam in our inboxes, where will I get viagra v14gr4 now??? /sadface (I’m joking of course)
The bad news about Microsoft’s success is that the reduction in global spam will only be temporary. There are millions of dollars to be made from sending spam emails and you can be sure it won’t be long until another network will take Rustock’s place. Think of Microsoft’s efforts as treating the symptoms rather than the cause. It’s better than nothing, but goes in a circle.
