Have you noticed any decrease in your spam mail? We should see some changes this week because of of the world's largest spam producing botnet, Grum, was taken out of commission last week. According to CNN MoneyTech, Grum and Lethnic botnets are responsible for about 50% of the spam. Grum was creating 18 BILLION emails every day. The spam was advertising pharmaceutical cheap drugs. The operators of Lethnic, another botnet, went "underground" after Grum was disabled. The effort to disable Grum was an international coordinated effort. You can read more about the Grum take down (reads like a mystery novel) at http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/19/technology/grum-spam-botnet/index.htm
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet has a very good explanation on botnets.
The topic of botnets is discussed in an earlier blog and also in the 4th edition of the textbook. Interestingly enough, I picked up my first malware ever when I was researching the topic of botnets for the textbook. I now keep Malwarebytes operating on my Windows PC. Malwarebytes detection is free from http://pchelpcenter.org/Malware-Download-Repair/repair/ . You have to register to remove any found malware (don't remember having to do that earlier). The fee for Malwarebytes Pro is $24.95.
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet has a very good explanation on botnets.
The topic of botnets is discussed in an earlier blog and also in the 4th edition of the textbook. Interestingly enough, I picked up my first malware ever when I was researching the topic of botnets for the textbook. I now keep Malwarebytes operating on my Windows PC. Malwarebytes detection is free from http://pchelpcenter.org/Malware-Download-Repair/repair/ . You have to register to remove any found malware (don't remember having to do that earlier). The fee for Malwarebytes Pro is $24.95.
