In the battle against Internet Scammers, Microsoft opened a new front using the power of a U.S. court to deal a knockout blow to an emerging botnet and taking a provider of free Internet domains offline.<\/p>\n
Microsoft got the order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, telling top-level domain registrar Verisign<\/strong> to take down the domains on Septtember 22, but it was sealed until Monday. Microsoft used the same technique that worked for its earlier takedowns of the Rustock and Waledac botnets, asking a U.S. court to order Verisign to shut down 21 Internet domains associated with the command-and-control servers that form the brains of the Kelihos<\/strong> botnet.<\/p>\n Kelihos is a small botnet with 42,000 – 45,000 infected computers in the wild. Malicious sites on the ‘cz.cc’ domain had previously been used to trick Macintosh users into thinking they needed to buy a bogus security program called MacDefender.<\/p>\n Usually, the bad guys select whichever domain is the cheapest and most reliable. Furthermore, they use a series of tricks to spread malware like MacDefender and many more with the help of bulk subdomains. In the battle against Internet Scammers, Microsoft opened a new front using the power of a U.S. court to deal a knockout blow to an emerging botnet and taking a provider of free Internet domains offline. Microsoft got the order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, telling top-level […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[78,22,49,72],"class_list":["post-72427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-botnet","tag-email-malware","tag-malware","tag-microsoft"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72427"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickheal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe website take-down occurred just after midnight, Pacific Time, Monday.<\/p>\n
\nHowever, Verisign were responsible for sending a little under 4 billion spam messages per day.
\nThese included junk mails related to stock scams, pornography, illegal pharmaceuticals and malicious software, amongst others.
\nTechnically, the botnet looked a lot like Waledac.<\/p>\n
\nIn some cases more than 50,000 malware domains are found to be from a single bulk provider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"