The Rustock botnet operated for several years, and at several times was the largest operating botnet on Earth sending spam emails. This talk covers the history of the botnet, and the most recent shutdown of it instigated by researchers (Operation b107). The techniques used can be generalized to the takedown of other botnets.
Julia Wolf was instrumental in the takedown of the Srizbi botnet in 2008 (at the time, the largest spam botnet by email volume). She reverse engineered every version of the bot, and precalculated all future C&C hostnames, which were then registered and pointed to a sinkhole. She has also reverse engineered several types of ransomware, broke the custom encryption used, and helped victims to recover their data. More recently, she was involved with the takedown of the Rustock botnet. She has spoken at several conferences; most recently about the security aspects of the PDF syntax itself. Julia first learned to program on a Commodore PET, and has been involved in computer security for a very long time.