CASL botnet take down

biohazardmailThe CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown. The warrant was to take down a C&C (command and control) server for Win32/Dorkbot. International efforts to take down C&C servers take a lot of effort and work and coordination. I’ve only ever heard stories from folks involved but the scale and work that goes into these take downs is amazing.
Bots are still a problem. Even if we manage to block 99% of the botnet mail out there people are still getting infected. Those infections spread and many of the newer bots steal passwords, banking credentials and other confidential information.
This kind of crime is hard to stop, though, because the internet makes it so easy to live in one country, have a business in a third, have a shell corp in a fourth, and have victims in none of those places. Law enforcement across the globe has had to work together and develop new protocols and new processes to make these kinds of takedowns work.
 

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Update: As of Nov 24, 2015 11:18 Pacific, Spamhaus has rebuilt the zone and removed the broken entries. Expect the new data to propagate in 10 – 15 minutes. Delivery should be back to normal.
The CBL issued a statement, which I reposted for readers that find this post in the future. I think it’s important to remember there is a lot of malicious traffic out there and that malicious traffic affects all of us, even if we never see it.
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