A COMPUTER NETWORK which was responsible for 18 per cent of the world’s spam has been disabled by security experts.

According to a blogpost by the malware intelligence lab FireEye the Grum botnet, which was the third largest in the world, was ‘knocked down’ yesterday after three days of effort.

FireEye first took down a Dutch server, followed by one in Panama. The post explains that:

The shutdown of the Panamanian server meant a lot… Grum was comprised of two different segments. One was being controlled from Panama and one from Russia.

However, FireEye’s Atif Mushtaq said that ‘bot herders’ then began ‘pointing their botnet to new destinations’, with six new servers established in the Ukraine.

By passing information and intelligence between researchers, security analysts and internet service providers around the world, FireEye and a number of other parties were able to shut down the Russian and Ukrainian servers.

Spamhaus, a non profit organisation which tracks spam operations and sources has said that it has seen a decline in Grum IP addresses sending out spam from 120,000 daily, to just 21,505. Mushtaq said it’s expected that this will fade completely:

Keep on dreaming of a junk-free inbox.

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