With court backing and a novel use of a civil procedure, Microsoft appears to be close to obliterating the Waledac spam botnet, changing the way online criminal operations are defeated.
A magistrate judge in federal court in Virginia is expected to recommend within days that the judge hearing Microsoft's case grant a default judgment, Richard Boscovich, a senior Microsoft attorney told CNET on Wednesday.
This would mean that the 276 Web domains deployed as Waledac command-and-control servers to provide instructions to thousands of infected computers would be forfeited to Microsoft, effectively shutting down the botnet for good, he said.
What's unusual about the case is that Microsoft is relying on a procedure known as "ex parte," which allows a court to make decisions without the purported owners of the domains to be present. Ordinarily, a judge couldn't give away property, such as domain ownership, without providing the registered domain owner the right to challenge the request in court.