Think botnets are just a fact of life in the digital age? Microsoft doesn’t. The firm has scored a victory in the fight against malware purveyors, securing a temporary injunction that shut down nearly 300 Internet domains believed to be associated with the massive “Waledac” botnet.
eSecurity Planet has the details on Microsoft’s win, and takes a look at the larger war on malware.
Microsoft said it obtained a temporary injunction this week that effectively shut down “Waledac,” one of the nation’s ten largest botnets, the spam-spewing networks of compromised PCs often controlled by international criminals.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia granted Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) request Monday to shut down some 277 Internet domains it believes were being used by the botnet, and Microsoft announced its success Thursday.
Waledac, as it’s known, had the capacity to send 1.5 billion spam messages per day and, in less than three weeks in December, delivered 651 million spam e-mails to Hotmail accounts, the company said in a post on The Official Microsoft Blog.
“At Microsoft, we don’t accept the idea that botnets are a fact of life … That’s why I’m proud to announce that through legal action and technical cooperation with industry partners, we have executed a major botnet takedown of Waledac, a large and well-known ‘spambot,'” Tim Cranton, Microsoft associate general counsel, said in the blog post.
