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Microsoft does battle with a botnet

If Microsoft's plan works, you might see a pronounced reduction in the amount of spam that reaches your mailbox over the next few days.

What is Microsoft's plan?

Well it seems that the company is effectively admitting defeat when it comes to successfully fending off malware infections on machines running its Windows operating system and has decided to use the courts to lend a hand.

But it hasn't sued the botnet operators, it has simply obtained a court order that has seen almost 300 domain names plucked from cyberspace and thrown into the recycling bin.

Codenamed "Operation b49", the goal of this initiative was to disconnect the malware infected computers from the machines that were being used to control their evil activities.

Microsoft estimates that some 1.5 billion spam messages a day were emanating from the network of computers infected with the Waledac botnet malware.

Good for you Microsoft... or maybe not.

Although the hundreds of thousands of infected PCs are no longer spewing spam, they are still carrying the malware from which the botnet was built and, at this stage, there appears to be no intention of disinfecting them or even advising owners of the fact that their machines have been compromised.

So where to now?

Perhaps Microsoft will issue a software patch as part of its Windows Update system which will de-activate the malware on those machines -- maybe not.

But what about the rights of those whose domains have been de-activated by order of the courts?

Chances are that a good number of those domains were also victims of evil little sods who had hacked into their servers and installed botnet control software. Now those sites are suddenly "off the air", pretty much without warning.

Is that fair?

Hell yes it's fair.

If you operate a server on the internet then you have a responsibility to ensure that it does not pose a threat to other Net-users.

Just as unsafe vehicles can be ordered off our roads, for fear they'll create an smash in which innocent people may die, so it should be with unsafe computers hooked up to the Net.

If a company's server gets hacked and loaded up with malware then they deserve disconnection, until such time as the system is clean and suitably protected from re-infection.

It's just a shame that those who are working to de-activate these botnets are focusing on the symptoms rather than the causes.

It's about time more of these evil little sods were thrown in jail and it's also about time those idiots who are stupid enough to buy their fake Viagra or penis-enlargement creams from spammers were hit with some hefty sanctions.

Since much of the drugware being flogged by spam originates in India, how about someone goes to the Indian authorities and says "Oi, your backyard drug industry is a major contributor to the levels of spam on the Net. Shut it down or else".

Then there are the credit-card companies who seem happy to sit back and collect their commissions on all the crap being pedaled by spammers. How about they add a clause to their merchant contracts that says "revenue generated by products or services directly sold as a result of spam will be forfeit" or at least added a clause that forbids any merchant (or their agents) to spam -- under threat of loss of that merchant facility.

It strikes me that without the cooperation of key players such as the CC merchants and governments of those countries that are most deeply involved in the spamming or delivery of spammed products we're stuffed.

How about, instead of spending all this time, effort and money infringing people's rights by way of conjuring up a secret ACTA agreement, we try dealing with the issue of creating an international accord designed to crush spamming?

I think (from memory) that the losses to *all* industry from spamming far exceeds the losses that the recording and movie industries are suffering from copyright infringement.

Let's try to deal with the bigger problems before we focus on the comparatively small issues that affect just a couple of industries -- shall we?

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