Microsoft moves forward with Waledac takedown

Microsoft has won a major victory in its campaign to shut down the notorious Waledac malware botnet.

The company has been awarded a summary judgement giving it control of 276 domains being used by Waledac's operators, allowing it to shut down the sites.

Microsoft does not expect an appeal against the judgement, but said that the botnet's operators have objected to the move in other ways, such as launching a denial-of-service attack on its legal team.

Microsoft was granted the temporary ability to shut down Waledac's domains in February, and the company has reported no new activity from the botnet since March.

"Our intention with this approach was to disable the command and control infrastructure of the botnet so that new commands could not be issued to the computers which were still infected with the malware, and to maintain that control in the long term while working within the law," said Jeff Williams, group programme manager at the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, in a blog post.

The job of cleaning up Waledac, however, is not complete. Microsoft must now work with service providers and security groups to notify and clean the estimated 58,000 systems still believed to be infected.