Recently, Microsoft stated that, the synchronized take-down of the Rustock botnet and follow-up attempts had eliminated the malware from more than half of the computers once hijacked by the Russian hackers, as reported by COMPUTERWORLD on July 05, 2011.
The Rustock botnet was believed to have dispatched out billions of spam e-mails regularly. Richard Broscovitch, Senior Attorney at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, stated that, since the time of the actual takedown to now, they estimate that, the Rustock botnet is presently less than half the size it was when they shut down Rustock during March (2011), as reported by Redmondmag on July 05, 2011.
He said that, since March 2011, when Microsoft lawyers and U.S. Marshals stopped Rustock command and control (C&C) servers at 5 Web hosting providers in 7 U.S. cities, the number of Windows computers infected with the malware has declined globally from 1.6 Million to slight above 700,000, as of June 18, 2011.
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