Good news on the Spamming front

Which is one of the biggest spamming gang?
It uses several names, but is known as HerbalKing, and usually sends billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users (the ones for example promoting replica watches, weight loss miracles and so on).
Well, against them the Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory.
Modern spam accounts for 90 percent of all e-mail sent over the Internet.
To reach its goals HerbalKing group used a botnet, a global network of computers infected with malicious software, without the knowledge of their owners.
Just like a virus which tells his host cell what to do, how to spread malware,they could control up to 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.
But spam email was nothing compare to financial damages: F.T.C. investigators said they monitored the group’s finances closely and that it cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone.
While the commission has brought more than 100 cases against spammers and spyware vendors over the past decade, spam operation was perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.
The government is also filing criminal charges against the group.
One of the activities of the gang was shipping drugs like Propecia, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft out of India. The Food and Drug Administration tested the “herbal” pills from the group and found in them a certain amount of the ingredient of Viagra, a substance risky for people with weak heart conditions.
Even though all this will send a strong message to spammers, it is not clear if spam volumes will decrease and certainly we won't see any difference in our mail box in the near future.