Waledac

According to reports from Last Line security firm researchers have taken a closer insight into the inside of the renewed Waledac botnet and found that the Storm botnet successor contain passwords for almost 500,000 Pop3 email accounts, allowing spam to be sent through SMTP servers. Waledac masterminds hijack legitimate email servers and evade IP-based blacklisting techniques that many spam filters use to weed out junk messages.

Microsoft was granted a recommendation by a federal magistrate judge to size 276 internet addresses used to control “Waledac,” a massive botnet that the software company has been working to bring down. The recommendation by Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson of the US District Court for Eastern Virginia is a victory in Microsoft's experimental campaign to wrest control of one of the net's biggest menaces.

Waledac botnet that was taken down in February this year is again waking up. As is known the court order ruled to close Waledac-related domains, depeer the botnet's peer-to-peer communications and take down the server.

While it may seem that Microsoft’s operation brought a success it was only superficial as it did nothing to clean up estimated 90,000 infected bot clients. While they were depeered they waited for their time to get up again.

Last week Internet community rejoiced over the take down of the Mariposa and Waladec botnets. Still many security experts think this is not the definitive victory and in fact the winning is too small. It is the prosecution of the orchestrators behind such criminal schemes that will make the fight against botnents efficient.