Good News! You’ll see a dramatic decrease in spam as one of the biggest generators of spam has been shut down. It could reduce the quantity of the world’s spam as much as 50%.
The take down is a result of a coordinated effort by security firms and Internet service providers around the world. They took down a spam network known as “the Grum botnet.” Grum used to be one of the world’s most prolific spamming operations. It is reported that Grum generated around 18 billion emails a day!
A botnet is a group of networked computers that are infected with malware (the owners of the computers are not aware of the infection) and controlled by spam criminals.
When the criminals gain control of botnets, they use them for spewing out tons of spam or launching DOS ( denial of service) attacks on targeted websites.
Grum was first detected in 2008 and it used several hundred thousand computers around the globe to send out massive amounts of spam advertising cheap pharmaceuticals.
Spamhaus, a large spam monitoring company, reports that Grum averaged about 120,000 infected computers a day generating spam. After the takedown, that number dwindled to 21,505. As of Thursday, the lastest report is that zero infected machines are sending their spam!