Experts take down Grum spam botnet, world's third largest

Computer-security experts took down the world's third-largest botnet, which they say was responsible for 18 percent of the world's spam.

Command-and-control servers in Panama and the Netherlands pumping out up to 18 billion spam messages a day for the Grum botnet were taken down Tuesday, but the botnet's architects set up new servers in Russia later in the day, according to a New York Times report. California-based security firm FireEye and U.K.-based spam-tracking service SpamHaus traced the spam back to servers in Russia and worked with local ISPs to shut down the servers, which ran networks of infected machines called botnets.

The tech community has stepped up its efforts of late to take these botnets offline. Microsoft in particular has been quite active, using court orders to seize command-and-control servers and cripple the operations of the Waledac, Rustock, and ... [Read more]