One of the world’s largest spam botnets still alive after suffering significant blow

One of the world’s most active spam botnets — Grum — was crippled after two of its command and control (CnC) servers hosted in the Netherlands were taken down, according to researchers from security firm FireEye.

These two CnC servers were responsible for pumping spam instructions to their zombies, said FireEye senior staff scientist Atif Mushtaq in a blog post on Tuesday. With these two servers offline, the spam template inside Grum’s memory will soon time out and the zombies will try to fetch new instructions but will not able to find them.

If Grum stops sending spam, it will have a significant impact on the global spam volume, Mushtaq said. However, this might be just a temporary victory, because the botnet’s creators still control two CnC servers hosted in Russia and Panama — via redwolf.newsvine.com