Man Challenges 250,000 Strong Botnet and Succeeds
nandemoari writes "When security officials decide to 'go after' computer malware, most conduct their actions from a defensive standpoint. For most of us, finding a way to rid a computer of the malware suffices — but for one computer researcher, however, the change from a defensive to an offensive mentality is what ended the two year chase of a sinister botnet once and for all. For two years, Atif Mushtaq had been keeping the notorious Mega-D bot malware from infecting computer networks. As of this past November, he suddenly switched from defense to offense. Mega-D had forced more than 250,000 PCs to do its bidding via botnet control."
All they did was get the DCs hosting the command and control servers to shut them down and register the spare domain names.
Obviously this was a temporary solution.