Waledac -- the spamming botnet formerly known as Storm -- was downed
yesterday in a sneak attack by a team from Microsoft, Shadowserver, the
University of Washington, Symantec, and a group of researchers from Germany and
Austria who had first infiltrated the botnet last year.
In an unprecedented move, Microsoft secured a federal court order that, in
effect, required VeriSign to cut off 277 Internet .com domains that were serving
as the connections between Waledac's command and control (C&C) servers and
around 60,000 to 80,000 bots or infected machines it had recruited to spew its
spam. Waledac is best-known for its online pharmacy, phony products, jobs, and
penny stock spam scams, and has the capacity to send more than 1.5 billion spam
email messages per day.
