Researchers Say They Took Down World’s Third-Largest Botnet

The New York Times: Your inbox may receive a little less spam today. Security researchers from the U.S., the U.K. and Russia worked together to take down Grum, the world’s third largest botnet. Experts say Grum sent out 18 billion spam messages every day, or about 18 percent of the world’s spam.

The researchers say it is unlikely that the people behind Grum will be able to get it back up and running soon. “They’d have to start an entirely new campaign and infect hundreds of thousands of new machines to get something like Grum started again,” said Atif Mushtaq, one of the researchers involved in the take-down. ”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.”