There you are, in Naboo’s capital city, hopelessly
outnumbered and surrounded by battle droids. All hope seems lost. But then,
abruptly, the droids stop moving. Resistance forces have destroyed the control
ship guiding the droid army’s movements – rendering the battle droids disabled.
The planet is finally at peace.
Yeah, that pretty much happened yesterday.
Security experts at FireEye brought down the massive Grum
botnet yesterday. Responsible for about 18 billion spam messages per day, world
spam levels are expected to drop by about 18% in the wake of the shutdown.
Grum operated primarily out of servers in Panama and the
Netherlands. But when those main servers were shut down on Tuesday, the “bot
herders” immediately set up new servers in Russia and the Ukraine. FireEye immediately
began working with Russian and Ukrainian ISPs and successfully brought down the
new servers as well.
Experts at FireEye say that restarting the botnet won’t be
as simple as building new servers.
"It's not about creating a new server. They'd have to
start an entirely new campaign and infect hundreds of thousands of new machines
to get something like Grum started again," Atif Mushtaq, a computer
security specialist at FireEye, told the Times. "They'd have to build from
scratch. Because of how the malware was written for Grum, when the master
server is dead, the infected machines can no longer send spam or communicate
with a new server." [NY Times]
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