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Microsoft Secretly Beheads Notorious Waledac Botnet
Barence writes "Microsoft has quietly won court approval to deactivate 277 domain names that are being used to control a vast network of infected PCs. The notorious Waledac botnet is being used by Eastern European spammers to send 1.5 billion spam messages every day, and infect hundreds of thousands of machines with malware. In a suit filed in the US District Court of Eastern Virginia, Microsoft accused 27 unnamed defendants of violating federal computer crime laws. It further requested that domain registrar Verisign temporarily deactivate the domains, shutting down the control servers being used to send commands to the machines. The request was secretly approved by District Judge Leonie Brinkema, allowing the action to be taken covertly, preventing Waledac's operators from switching domains."
The internet is being taken over by Government and their corporate buddies.
Welcome to 1984.
considering people use something, you should be able to expect a rudimentary understanding of those same things which people use. You expect someone who drives a car to understand that they need to change the oil, fill up the gas, etc.
Likewise, you should (note:should) be able to expect people to elect to learn how to get a good virus scanning program, how to tell spoof websites, etc. Meanwhile computers are newer than cars, so it's going to take a while for people to get to that point. People are still getting a grasp on spam email and fake websites/false authentication right now.
It folks don't really dedicate educating users on what you should do routinely, and likewise people don't all change their oil on time.
10 years from now, this will be less of an issue. not now though.
Wait - Microsoft supplies the motive power to the botnets to start with - hooray, when they finally shut one down? Big deal - it will be replaced before the day is out, I'm sure.
Now, MS WOULD deserve an attaboy, if they managed to create a popular operating system that is as immune to botnets as the various Unix derivatives. Not a big hooray, just an "attaboy".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You see, I've found a properly updated Windows box is actually pretty hard to infect,
It actually takes between 30 seconds and 2 minutes for the Windows machine to get its first infection. After 10 minutes it will be riddled with crap to the point of uselessness - and this is a "Fully Patched" Windoze 7 install.
Security is something other people do, according to Microsoft.
A whole series of stupid decisions way back when the NT kernel was still young, a whole lot of even worse commercial decisions since then, and a programming workforce that just don't care guarantee that Windows will never achieve any kind of security or stability.