Grum was an especially vast and nasty spammer. First detected in early 2008, its malware infected several hundred thousand computers around the world and churned out huge amounts of pharmaceutical spam advertising cheap drugs.
At its peak, Grum was the world’s most prolific spam machine, though researchers recently dropped it to the number three spot on their ever-changing list of the world’s largest botnets.
The tale of its demise reads like a high-tech thriller.
Continue reading via Grum takedown: ’50% of worldwide spam is gone’ – Jul. 19, 2012.
I do not believe spam is ever going to be eradicated, because just like any other lucrative action, it will be protected. For instance, I just dealt with a customer who had 31k emails and about 80% of them were spam or what I call subscription trickery. Technically they are both spam, I just say subscription trickery because many companies do just that; they trick you into or hide your enrollment into their spam when you are doing other things on their website, such as registering for an account.
One big reason why this bot-net was probably taken out of commission is because of”take downs” of profitable business like PS3′s network back in April of 2012. Sony, I guarantee you, wasn’t happy with the loss of business and the liability / implications of letting customers “sensitive” information fall into the wrong hands. There you have a motive to put a price on the heads of these botnets and groups like “Anonymous”.
Could we ever see a day without spam, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’ve learned that what is ideal and utopian is often times (no matter how possible) completely ruled out or deemed as impossible by most people. It would be a nice day to see, definitely.
Examples:
http://www.zdnet.com/sony-playstation-network-creeps-back-online-4010022456/
