In the last few months security firms have scored several notable successes against gangs that own and operate botnets – collections of hijacked home computers.

The vast majority of spam or junk mail is routed through these hijacked machines.

One of the biggest successes was against the Pushdo or Cutwail botnet, which had been in operation since 2007 and was thought to be sending about 10% of global spam.

An international operation co-ordinated by the security firm LastLine managed to get 20 of the 30 servers controlled by the group shut down. The servers were turned off with the help of the internet service providers unwittingly found to be hosting them.

As a result, many of the “drone” PCs in the huge botnet used to send e-mail were cut off and no longer relayed the junk messages.

Millions of machines around the world are turned into spam-sending “botnets”
Bredolab was another big botnet hit in October thanks to work by the hi-tech division of the national crime squad in the Netherlands. The arrest of an Armenian man thought to be the botnet’s controller led to the closure of the 143 servers linked to Bredolab.

This would never happen on a network managed by ForLinux because each server on our network is fully managed. This means that we monitor for excessive bandwidth and should malicious traffic be discovered we will work with the client to identify how the server was potentially compromised. We would never just shutdown a server.