Together with federal law enforcement officials in the US, Microsoft has taken action and had the Rustock botnet taken down. A botnet is a network of compromised computers. They can be contacted by a remote master computer, and used to perform tasks such as sending out spam emails on behalf the network’s operator. It has been estimated that this network of slave computers was sending out up to thirty billion spam emails every day.
As a result, you may have noticed this week that the level of spam you’ve been getting took a noticeable nosedive.
Or perhaps not. There’s still lots of other botnets and people sending out spam, and the disabling of Rustock in no way suggests that you should be reducing your personal anti-virus measures.