http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/microsoft_refers_rustock_to_fbi/ By Dan Goodin in San Francisco The Register 22nd September 2011 Microsoft lawyers have sealed their victory over the operators of what was once the world's biggest source of spam after winning a court case giving them permanent control over the IP addresses and servers used to host the Rustock botnet. The seizure was completed earlier this month when a federal judge in Washington state awarded Microsoft summary judgement in its novel campaign against Rustock, which at its height enslaved about 1.6 million PCs and sent 30 billion spam messages per day. The complex legal action ensured that IP addresses and more than two dozen servers for Rustock were seized simultaneously to prevent the operators from regrouping. Now the attorneys are turning over the evidence obtained in the case to the FBI in hopes that the Rustock operators can be tracked down and prosecuted. Microsoft has already offered a $250,000 bounty for information leading to their conviction. It has also turned up the pressure by placing ads in Moscow newspapers to satisfy legal requirements that defendants be given notice of the pending lawsuit. According to court documents (PDF), the Rustock ringleader is a Russian citizen who used the online handle Cosma2k to buy IP addresses that hosted many of the Rustock command and control servers. Microsoft investigators claimed the individual distributed malware and was involved in illegal spam pitching pharmaceutical drugs. [...] _____________________________________________________________ Register now for the #HITB2011KUL - Asia's premier deep-knowledge network security event now in it's 9th year! http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2011kul/Received on Fri Sep 23 2011 - 02:50:00 PDT
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