From Dark Reading

Botnet's spam traffic cut by 80 percent

The researchers who successfully shut down much of the Pushdo botnet's infrastructure last week didn't go in planning to take down a large chunk of the botnet -- that was a secondary but major byproduct of some related botnet research they were conducting.

Thorsten Holz, senior threat analyst at LastLine and assistant professor of computer science at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, says he and his colleagues were working on a research project involving various botnets, including Pushdo, MegaD, and Rustock, matching infected IP addresses with their respective botnets. They decided to they needed C&C servers to evaluate an algorithm they were developing for the project, which ultimately led them to decide to take down some Pushdo C&C servers to assist their research, he says. "Pushdo's command and control infrastructure turns out to be pretty vulnerable to takedown efforts, so we identified the C&C servers in eight different hosting providers," Holz says. "It was the ideal target to get the servers down and analyze the data."

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