After Rustock, botnet rebuilding underway

In March, Microsoft, the US Federal Marshal service and security firm FireEye took down the Rustock botnet, a network of a million compromised computers surreptitiously managed by a group of criminal bot operators.

While the takedown resulted in spam dropping by nearly a third, it netted an unintended side effect: An increase in the volume of email messages with malicious links or attachments. Security experts theorize that the takedown of the Rustock botnet has left a deep pit in the supply of compromised computers and that bot operators are scrambling to build bigger botnets — via redwolf.newsvine.com