Ingenieria

Grum Spam Botnet Taken Down
07/23/2012 by Cory A. in Online Casino News

Score one for the good guys in the global fight against spam.
According to CNN, 50% of worldwide spam is now gone thanksto a takedown of the
Grum spam botnet.
Grum was estimated to dispatch more than 18 billion spam emails per day through it’s bot
network. A botnet is a network of computers affected with a malwarevirus that are used by
attackers to dispatch high volumes of spam or to launch denial-of-service attacks aimed at
taking down websites.
Grum botnet servers in Panama and the Netherlands were takendown on Tuesday. That left
operators of the spam network with only a server in Russia supporting their enterprise. But
security experts were one step ahead. U.K.-based SpamHaus worked with theCalifornia
security firm FireEye to get Russian ISPs to shut down Grum’s servers.
Atif Mushtaq, a computer security specialist at FireEye, told the New York Times, “They’d
have to start an entirely newcampaign and infect hundreds of thousands of new machines
to get something like Grum started again. They’d have to build from scratch. Because of
how the malware was written for Grum, when the masterserver is dead, the infected
machines can no longer send spam or communicate with a new server.”
The Grum botnet first came online in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of machines were
infected with itsmalware worldwide and were used to dispatch spam advertising
pharmaceuticals and cheap drugs online. For all the destruction Grum caused, it had a fatal
flaw: an inability to recover if all itscommand servers were simultaneously knocked
offline.
Various estimates have been released ranging from 15%-50% for exactly how much of the
world’s spam the Grum botnet was responsible for.
AffiliateAngle
Spam is a big issue for iGaming affiliates. Some email service providers don’t even accept
gambling content due to the pervasive nature of gambling-related spam emails.
Legitimate affiliates...