mushtaq

An international security campaign has taken down Grum, a hacker-controlled botnet responsible for the daily release of 18 billion spam emails. The takedown effort began two weeks ago, when authorities in the Netherlands pulled the plug on Grum's ... two main servers. Other servers in Panama went offline earlier this week. Grum's last servers were disconnected in Russia, effectively killing the botnet. Group Effort Stops Grum The demise of the Grum botnet was confirmed by security vendor FireEye in a recent blog post. Grum's termination apparently resulted from a group effort. To kill the ... (view more)

When security officials decide to "go after" computer malware, most conduct their actions from a defensive standpoint. For most of us, finding a way to rid a computer of the malware suffices -- but for one computer researcher, however, the change ... from a defensive to an offensive mentality is what ended the two year chase of a sinister botnet once and for all. For two years, Atif Mushtaq had been keeping the notorious Mega-D bot malware from infecting computer networks. As of this past November, Mega-D had forced more than 250,000 PCs to do its bidding via botnet control. That's when Mushtaq ... (view more)