Operation B49

Since couple of weeks back Microsoft has been working on secret Operation B49 to wipe out Waledac botnet. Waledac is one of the largest botnets active and having major presence in US and European countries. This botnet is believed to be actively sending spam messages and had capacity to send billions of spam mails per day. Microsoft’s observation concluded that in just 18 days time the botnet has sent more than 650 million spam emails just to hotmail accounts. This operation ended successfully on Wednesday.

Researches from the University of Mannheim in Germany and Technical University Vienna in Austria published a research paper on Waledec botnet and showcased a method to control this botnet. Microsoft contacted those researchers this year and planned a major offensive against the Waledec botnet by planning to take control of all the command an control severs which were in hundreds and distributed across the globe.

Microsoft legal team took courts permission from District Court of Eastern Virginia. This was quite difficult but finally they managed to get the permission to temporary shutdown almost 277 Internet domains believed to be run by the Waledac bot for command and control.

This helped to cut off traffic between Waledac servers and zombies from source level. This disconnected the hacker groups connection between them and the zombie computers across the globe. Now remains the job of cleaning the zombie’s.

We appreciate this move by Microsoft and congratulate them for able to get through the legal hurdles and making such a huge attempt to stop the new edge problem.

Now we have to wait and watch the gradual slow down of the botnet traffic and its after effect. We are sure this will surely have major effect on the botnets business. Even though it may be temporary but it is significant enough. We know that this will not stop these hackers all together but doing such action will definitely make their job more difficult. One should keep on doing such activity repeatedly to dismantle the hackers functioning network.