Waledac, also known by its aliases Waled and Waledpak,[1] was a botnet mostly involved in e-mail spam. In March 2010 the botnet was taken down by Microsoft.[2][3]
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Before its eventual take down the Waledac botnet consisted of an estimated 70,000-90,000 [2] computers infected with the "Waledac" computer worm. The botnet itself was capable of sending about 1.5 billion spam messages a day, or about 1% of the total global spam volume.[3][4]
On February 25, 2010, Microsoft won a court order which resulted in the temporal cut-off of 277 domain names which were being used as command and control servers for the botnet, effectively crippling a large part of the botnet.[5] However, besides operating through command and control servers the Waledac worm is also capable of operating through peer-to-peer communication between the various botnet nodes, which means that the extent of the damage is difficult to measure.[6] Codenamed 'Operation b49', an investigation was conducted for some months which thereby yielded an end to the 'zombie' computers. More than a million 'zombie' computers were brought out of the garrison of the hackers but still infected[7].
In early September 2010, Microsoft was granted ownership of the 276 domains used by Waledac to broadcast spam email.[8]
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