Rustock--which in March was knocked offline by federal authorities and Microsoft--was able to send some 30 billion spam messages a day, such as for phony Pfizer prescription drugs and fake Microsoft lottery scams. FireEye, researchers at the University of Washington, Pfizer, the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit, and the Chinese CERT all assisted in the operation to take down the botnet, which had an army of some 1.6 million machines worldwide at its peak. And there are still some 700,000 machines infected with the botnet's malware, according to a recent report from Microsoft.
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