According to BBC, the Rustock botnet, the most prolific producer of spam on the internet producing some 200 billion messages a day, appears to have been silenced. In what is termed a Herculean task, disrupting the command and control infrastructure requires the co-ordination of security groups with insight in to how the botnet operates, the participation of law-enforcement agencies, domain name registrars and internet service providers that can potentially be located in different time zones. Security researchers said this could be the largest ever take down of a cyber crime network.
“But no-one has yet confirmed that silencing Rustock was the result of co-ordinated activity, Mr Wood said.
‘One of the problems for law enforcers is deciding when to take action,’ he said.
Once police know enough about a botnet to be able to take it down, they can collect an awful lot of intelligence about its owners, he added.
Previous attempts to take down botnets have enjoyed mixed success.