At present there are many high profile cases of large international organisations and collaborations working together to neutralise botnets worldwide. These include the IT company Microsoft and their efforts to disrupt Zeus, a huge network responsible for millions of pounds of theft since it began.Today, IT security company FireEye and other services including SpamHuas and local ISP providers have managed to shut down an illegal network going by the name Grum. This was believed to be responsible for 18% of the Worlds spam.Grums CnCs- command and control servers were shut down in panama on Tuesday, this followed the shutdown of a server in Holland. The bot herders reacted to this attack by pointing the rest of the CNCs to secondary servers in the Ukraine. In the past a move like this would have stopped the attempt to close down the operation as shutting down servers in the Ukraine was not easy. In this case however, pressure on local ISPs made the shutdown possible. The 20,000 computers which were part of the bot net are still live but they are expected to be rendered ineffective as the CnCs are no longer active. While these efforts to stop spammers sending out useless mail are moving forwards, it is still important for home and business users to employ a good anti- spam service either though your internal IT Support team or IT services provider.
