After taking down the longstanding Rustock botnet earlier this year, Microsoft says it has taken down another troublesome network, the botnet known as Kelihos (Waledac 2.0).
"Kelihos infected Internet users' computers with malicious software which allowed the botnet to surreptitiously control a person's computer and use it for a variety of illegal activities, including sending out billions of spam messages, harvesting users' personal information (such as e-mails and passwords), fraudulent stock scams and, in some instances, websites promoting the sexual exploitation of children," Richard Domingues Boscovich, senior attorney with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in the blog post.
"The Kelihos takedown is intended to send a strong message to those behind botnets that it's unwise for them to simply try to update their code and rebuild a botnet once we've dismantled it," Boscovich wrote. "When Microsoft takes a botnet down, we intend to keep it down."
