Microsoft fights spam

Computer giant Microsoft along with US federal law enforcement agencies seized a number of computers and other hardware associated with sending out the Rustock botnet. Rustock sends out hundreds of thousands of spam emails peddling everything from software to pharmaceuticals. And according to Symantec,the Rustock botnet spam ring was responsible for up to 39% of all spam last year.

Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit and US Marshals raided a number of hosting facilities in order to remove zombie-like infected hardware. Microsoft had filed a lawsuit in District court pleading their case of malicious abuse of their Hotmail servers along with misuse of other Microsoft software. This raid was not the first of its kind as Microsoft participated in a similar raid last year focused on the malicious Waledac bot.

In a company blog, Microsoft says "...To be confident that the bot could not be quickly shifted to new infrastructure, we sought and obtained a court order allowing us to work with the U.S. Marshals Service to physically capture evidence onsite and, in some cases, take the affected servers from hosting providers for analysis. Specifically, servers were seized from five hosting providers operating in seven cities in the U.S., including Kansas City, Scranton, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, Columbus and, with help from the upstream providers, we successfully severed the IP addresses that controlled the botnet, cutting off communication and disabling it. This case and this operation are ongoing and our investigators are now inspecting the evidence gathered from the seizures to learn what we can about the botnet’s operations."

An interesting aspect to this news is that Microsoft is not only helping investigations of fraudulent and harmful spam, but they are doing something actively about it as a company priority. Hopefully, we will all be seeing less spam in the coming months, but no doubt that there will be other ways that spam will get to our inboxes.

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