The infamous Rustock botnet which sent up to 30 billion spam messages a day, may have been run by just two or three people.

Early analysis following raids to knock out the spam network suggests that the work was carried out by a small team.

Rustock was formed from about one million hijacked PCs and used a series of tricks to disguise itself from scrutiny for years.

Since the raids on the network’s hardware, global spam levels have dropped.