The Rustock botnet, responsible at its height for sending 30 billion spam e-mails a day, went silent last Wednesday. Its command and control servers, responsible for telling the millions of machines recruited into the network which spams to send, were taken offline. With the botnet now headless, the deluge of spam was halted.

Security researchers tracking spam production immediately noticed the drop in spam volume. But what they didn’t know was why the botnet went silent. Rustock’s spam output had declined before, only to bounce back. Was this latest drop a temporary hiatus as the botnet’s operators prepared to unleash a new torrent of spam, or was it something more?

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How Operation b107 decapitated the Rustock botnet