A presentation at this week's LEET '11, a USENIX workshop on large-scale exploit and emergent threats, delves into the inner workings of the underground economy, specifically the rental and operation of spam botnets.
Brett Stone-Gross, a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave an overview of recently completed research he conducted with fellow researchers Thorsten Holz, Gianluca Stringhini and Giovanni Vigna. In August 2010, the team worked with contacts at various Internet Service Providers and were able to gain access to 13 Command & Control servers and three development servers used by botnet operators of the Cutwail spam engine, a botnet that has been around since 2007 and at one time was estimated to be the largest botnet in existence with the most infected hosts. Cutwail is also often referred to as Pushdo because of a separate Trojan component that installs the software.

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