Dead Network Provider Arms Rustock Botnet from the Hereafter

McColo, a network provider that was yanked offline following reports it enabled more than half the world’s spam, briefly returned from the dead over the weekend so it could hand-off command and control channels to a new source. The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to Paul Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus software maker Trend Micro