“Operation b49”
Tim Cranton, Microsoft’s associate general counsel posted on the company’s official blog early this morning that Microsoft has shut down the Waledac botnet.
He wrote:
“On February 22, in response to a complaint filed by Microsoft (“Microsoft Corporation v. John Does 1-27, et. al.”, Civil action number 1:10CV156) in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order cutting off 277 Internet domains believed to be run by criminals as the Waledac bot.”
The spambot, one of the 10 largest in the world, had infected “hundreds of thousands of computers around the world” and had the capacity to pump out 1.5 billion spam emails per day, he said.
Cranton also said that between December 3 and 21, Waledac sent 651 million spam emails to hotmail accounts. The botnet specializes in advertising a variety of goods and scams including knock-off products, online pharmacies, jobs and penny stocks.
Although the botnet command-and-control was disrupted, Cranton said hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide remain infected. “To help make sure you are not infected by this or other botnets, our advice is to follow the “protect your PC” guidance available at http://www.microsoft.com/protect,” he said.
Blog post here.
When are governments going to start going after spambots?
Why is it that governments across this planet aren’t doing this? The spam from botnets makes up 90 percent of Internet traffic. How much worse does it have to get? If Microsoft and security companies can shut these things down why don’t law enforcement agencies have the priorities and funding to do it?
Here’s a link to a NetworkWorld story from 2003 – THAT’S SEVEN YEARS AGO – that tried to estimate the alarming cost of spam WHEN IT ONLY COMPRISED 30 PERCENT OF THE BANDWIDTH!
It is the height of absurdity that governments of Australia, France and China are wasting time with controversial and ultimately doomed Internet anti-pornography initiatives and ignoring the botnets that threaten to totally fill the Internet bandwidth. They must believe that going after porn is an easy hit, popular with the electorate. Sure, some people are very offended by it and nobody with the exception of Playboy Enterprises Inc. spends any money defending it. If those folks who are so alarmed by Internet pornography are going to see it without actually going looking for it, it’s probably going to hit their inbox from a spambot!
And a whole lot of people go looking for it: http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html
Tom Kelchner