Oh, if only Freddie Mercury could see this headline. I’m sure he wouldn’t be too thrilled. But then again, who knows. Maybe he would have been one of the millions of victims of Grum, the third largest botnet in the world that had been using our computers and its servers to send us freighters-full of spam every day.. In that case, he might be singing the praises (mamma mia, mamma mia!) of the computer sleuths who tracked down Grum’s cadre of computers and iced them.
The New York Times sorts out the hunt:
Computer security experts blocked the botnet’s command and control servers in the Netherlands and Panama on Tuesday. But later that day, Grum’s architects had already set up seven new command and control centers in Russia and Ukraine. FireEye, a computer security company based in Milpitas, Calif., said it worked with its counterparts in Russia and with SpamHaus, a British organization that tracks and blocks spam, to take down those command and control centers Wednesday morning.
The researchers said they were able to vanquish the botnet by tracing Grum back to its servers and alerting Internet service providers to shut those computers down.
It’s like computers around the world just took a few puffs of their inhalers… uh, they’re breathing a little easier today. But, there’s always tomorrow. Whatever botnet was in fourth place is now in third, and the makers of Grum are probably hard at work tweaking some new code.
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