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Mega spam botnet brought down

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb news editor.
Johannesburg, 18 Mar 2011

Mega spam botnet brought down

Rustock, purveyor of more e-mail spam than any other network in the world, was felled last week by Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents, reveals Cnet.

A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company's request triggered several co-ordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network.

"This botnet is estimated to have approximately a million infected computers operating under its control and has been known to be capable of sending billions of spam mails every day," Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in the Microsoft digital crimes unit, wrote in a blog post.

PlayBook to sync with MS Exchange

The PlayBook - the iPad challenger from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) - is following Apple's device into the workplace with the assistance of Microsoft, according to The Register.

People getting Exchange e-mails will be able to synchronise with the version of Exchange Server behind Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365 cloud suite, RIM said yesterday.

Sync with Exchange is planned as part of RIM's BlackBerry Office 365 service, due as a beta around the time of Office 365, with availability in late 2011.

EMC's anti-hacking unit hacked

The world's biggest maker of data storage computers, EMC, yesterday said its security division had been hacked, and that the intruders compromised a widely used technology for preventing computer break-ins, reveals the Associated Press.

The breach is an embarrassment for EMC, also a premier security vendor, and potentially threatens highly-sensitive computer systems.

The incident is a rare public acknowledgement by a security company that its internal anti-hacking technologies have been hacked.

Aftershocks hit Japanese telcos

Aftershocks are still preventing Japan's telecommunication companies from repairing undersea cables, damaged in the recent earthquake and tsunami, writes the BBC.

To restore services, many providers have rerouted traffic to backup cables. KDDI, Japan's second-largest telecoms operator, says it will send out a ship equipped with remotely-controlled robots, as soon as the ground is still.

The robots can dive to a depth of 2 500m to repair the damaged cables - a task that may take months to complete.

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