The U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia last week granted a motion that, in effect, gives Microsoft permanent ownership of 276 Web domains once used by the Waledac cybergang to send instructions to hundreds of thousands of spam-spreading PCs.
Cybersleuths and attorneys at Microsoft's digital crimes unit actually decapitated the Waledac botnet in February by persuading District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema to issue a temporary restraining order to take the 276 domains offline.
Brinkema's order was unusual because the owner of the domains could not be reached and thus did not have a day in court to protest, says Microsoft senior attorney Richard Boscovich Sr.
With permanent ownership of the domains, Microsoft now has a proven legal means to take aim at U.S.-registered domains — including .com, .net, .biz and .org domains — shown to be conducting criminal activity. "It's open season on botnets," says Boscovich. "The hunting licenses have been handed out, and we're coming back for more."
The Waledac botnet was a major source of spam and PC infections, at its peak in 2009 delivering 1.5 billion spam messages daily. Microsoft added detection and filtering for Waledac infections to its free malicious software removal tool. But cleaning infected PCs one by one did not stop the command PCs.
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