Grum, the world’s third-largest botnet, has been shutdown, according to one of the security researchers who helped take the botnet offline, Atif Mushtaq. Mushtaq, who works for the “malware intelligence lab” FireEye, announced the good news on the security company’s blog yesterday after two intense days battling Grum. You may see less spam related to cheap “Cilais,” “Vigara,” or “Levtira” (misspellings of Cialis, Viagra, and Levitra, respectively) and fewer unwanted messages advertising Rolex watches as a result of the Grum botnet shutdown. With a command and control server in the Netherlands, and additional servers in countries such as Panama and Russia, taking down Grum required international coordination and effort.

The BBC is under fire today for a stunt that it pulled a few days ago, in which it rented a Russian bot net (also sometimes called a spam bot), and then sent millions of pieces of spam, and DOSed a corporate server.