18 Percent of World's Spam Mail Shut Down

If your inbox is seeming a little lighter these days and less jammed full of Nigerian princes offering you fortunes in exchange for your bank account number, it's likely because of the recent loss of the Grum botnet, which experts believed was responsible for about 18 percent of the world's supply of spam e-mail, or nearly one in every five spam messages sent out.

A coalition of security researchers, including spam-tracking service SpamHaus and the security company known as FireEye (News - Alert), joined up with a set of local Internet service providers (ISPs) to track down and kill off the massive spam botnet. This was no small task, given that the network of computers and servers comprising the botnet was spread out across a large swath of the planet, with representatives in Russia, the Ukraine and all the way in Panama.

The actual battle to kill Grum took no small amount of time and effort. One of Grum's Dutch servers had been shut down on Monday, followed by the loss of the CnC servers--Command and Control--servers in Panama on Tuesday. Grum promptly followed up by funneling most of its CnC functions to servers in the Ukraine. Worse, that particular location has been seen as something of a haven by botnet herders for some time now, and shutting down servers there "has never been easy," according to FireEye's Atif Mushtaq. Thus, the FireEye / SpamHaus group got in touch with an array of local ISPs, backed up by a good part of the worldwide security industry, to put pressure on the Ukrainian CnC servers and eventually see them shut down.

The marketing efficacy of spam is dubious to say the least--who's actually buying fake watches, or worse, medication from a random e-mail that showed up one day?--but considering the relative ease of sending e-mail, if even one person buys, it's one person more than did previously. This doesn't even include the potential for virus transmission and similar thefts that can come from spam attachments.

The primary point here is that there truly are no more "safe havens" for spammers any more. If Russia and the Ukraine can get involved in shutting down spammers, who is truly left to serve as protection for those who would use email for their own twisted ends? It may well be, as Mushtaq describes, that one day we will all see "a junk-free inbox". That day may not arrive soon, but with companies like FireEye, SpamHaus, and a host of others in the fray on one end or another, we may well reach that day sooner than anyone expected.

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