You will now get less Spam! (Hopefully).
 

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest Spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%.

Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis, and worked with police in the Netherlands to disable some of the command structure outside of the U.S.

With the immediate threat disabled, Microsoft then worked with upstream providers to black hole the IP addresses of whoever was controlling the botnet. To prevent further master controllers popping up, Microsoft worked with Chinese CN-CERT to block registration of domains that could be used by new command and control servers.

Finally, Microsoft is now working with ISPs and CERTs around the world to help clean the Rustock malware from around 1 million infected machines. It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't do this alone; specialists from Pfizer, FireEye (the company behind the Mega-D botnet takedown), and the University of Washington helped out.


SOURCE

Nice.:D

Hang them...

Popcorn anyone?

My Hotmail junk mail quota says otherwise :spammm:

What is actually mind-blowing is:

30 billion spam email per day!!!!

Wooowww :doh:

Bloody hell fire! :o

Aaanddd....

The World Just Got Back 13 Terawatt Hours of Spam-Wasted Electricity!


Spam is not only a big waste of your time, but it is a much bigger waste of a simply staggering amount of global electricity supplies. Transmitting, processing and filtering spam has been estimated by McAfee at taking an astonishing 33 billion kilowatt hours – that’s 33 terawatt hours (TWh) – of the global energy supply, every year!
Enough power, according to McAfee, in their “The Carbon Footprint of Spam” study, to “power 2.4 million homes” – in the first world.
In the third world – where Bill Gates does humanitarian work - that would go much further, and likely be enough to at least power some lighting for the last 2 billion people in the world that currently do not even have any electricity all.
Or the world could shutter quite a few dirty coal plants.
Cutting 33 terawatt hours of wasted energy worldwide by 39% is very, very, very huge. That’s been one hefty carbon footprint.


There you go then. For the greenies there's something in it as well.
'cause Greenies don't get spam. So everyone wins!


SOURCE

They may have caught the biggest, but another will step up to take their place.

Not only should they include the spammers, but the people who pay for the spam. Take away the source of the need. Make that crime just as illegal.


And what exactly did Pfizer have to do with this?

they make boner pills.

probably the top spam e mail subjects are

1. boner pills

2. Penis enlargement pills

3. get rich quick schemes

4. Nigerian Scams

in that order

Spamming is BUSINESS I believe that. They are making money out of it. Why else would they do it and invest heavily on it.

Now there are many "so-called" zombie PCs, which accounts for work and are controlled by different servers, and people, but is not required by the human presence with the deployment of sh!t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_computer