Fifty percent of web spam knocked out

A large, coordinated attack by web firms, Internet security companies and ISPs against the "the Grum botnet" may have resulted in an amazing victory. The Grum botnet was one of the leading email spam sources in the world--generating around 18 billion emails a day.

This victory possibly reduced worldwide spam by 50%, reports FireEye, an Internet security company.

CNNMoney money reported that this is "[g]ood news for your email inbox." This victory should affect users throughout the world and have a noticeable difference in spam loads to an average inbox.

The Grum botnet had multiple command and control centers, whose servers were spread throughout the world in countries like Russia, Panama, and the Netherlands. The coordinated team attacking Grum found it's weakness. The Grum network had no recovery mechanism if all of its command servers were simultaneously forced offline. Since the network had no fallback mechanism, security firms believe that the Grum network may not recover from this takedown.