pension333: Mapped: Rustock botnet shrinks as Microsoft offers $250,000 bounty

After weakening the giant botnet that could generate 30bn spam emails per day, Microsoft puts a bounty on its creators' heads, while we have the maps of where infections are worst

Microsoft has put a price on the heads of the criminals behind the Rustock spam botnet: $250,000. It might not quite be a retire-in-riches lottery prize, but for a lot of those on the edge of legality, who might know who the people behind the Russian-based network are, it could be a sufficiently tempting piece of fruit.

In a blog post, Richard Boscovich, senior lawyer at the company's Digital Crimes unit says that "we believe the Rustock bot-herders should be held accountable for their actions."

Rustock, Boscovich points out, was a notorious spam generator, able to produce up to 30bn spam emails per day. Despite the takedown in March which reduced the number of infected machines from 1.6m to around 703,000, there is still a long way to go.

The worst infected countries ahead of the takedown were India (322,000), Russia (94,000), Turkey (89,000), the US (86,000) and Italy (54,000).

Subsequently they are India (99,000), the US (56,000), Turkey (50,000), Italy (32,000) and Russia (27,000).

Boscovich adds that "Microsoft has already been gathering strong evidence in our ongoing investigation and this reward aims to take that effort a step further. We will continue to follow this case wherever it leads us and remain committed to working with our partners around the world to help people regain control of their Rustock-infected computers. (For free information and resources to clean your computer, visit support.microsoft.com/botnets.)"

Here are the maps (generated by OpenHeatMap of numbers of infections. There isn't much change between the two except that the US moves from second largest number of infections to fourth largest. India, perhaps surprisingly, remains the place with the most infections. The surprising absence? China. We'd like to know why it doesn't show up there.

Before...

..and after

Charles Arthur

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jul/19/microsoft-rustock-reward

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