[1][2][3] On October 14, 2008, the U.S Federal Trade Commission, in cooperation with Marshal Software, tracked down the owners of the botnet and froze their assets.
The Mega-D/Ozdok takedown involved coordination of dozens of Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and non-profit organizations like Shadowserver.
[7] Since then the botnet bounced back, exceeding pre-takedown levels by Nov. 22, and constituting 17% of worldwide spam by Dec.
In November 2010, Oleg Nikolaenko was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with violations of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
[10] Nikolaenko eventually pleaded guilty of operating the Mega-D botnet to create a "zombie network" of as many as 500,000 infected computers.