Grum botnet takedown cuts spam

The volume of spam proffering cheap and likely counterfeit medicines and other dubious products has been dramatically reduced with the takedown of the infamous Grum botnet, according to security company Trustwave.

A concerted effort by authorities around the world took down servers in the Netherlands, Panama, Ukraine and Russia, even as the criminals behind the operations set up new ones to try to evade the sweep.  Some functionality in the botnet was restored briefly yesterday (July 23), but was quickly blocked out.

The success follows similar takedowns in 2010 of two other spam operations - Spamit.com and the Rusteck botnet - which were notorious for diverting unwary consumers to rogue online pharmacies (see Spam down, with other threats grabbing share from pharma emails). Other botnets such as Cutwail and Lethic may however fill the void.

Trustwave's annual security report for 2012 points out that 54 per cent of all spam pushes pharmaceuticals, with 29 per cent of emails peddling pornography. The remaining 17 per cent covers a plethora of other activities, including fake/imitation wristwatches, dating, and phishing scams.

The company estimates that Grum accounted for around 35 per cent of total spam in the week ending July 22.