Kudos to my friends and colleagues at Microsoft Legal. They have successfully, and I believe are the first to have, cracked the zombie network infrastructure by reverse-engineering, if you will, a zombie attack. Or, more to the point, by inviting one.

By installing a bit of zombie code on an otherwise clean computer, and then connecting that computer to the Internet, Microsoft caused the computer to summon the zombie mothership, and boy did that mothership respond. Almost as soon as they connected the computer to the Internet, “connection requests from hundreds of IP addresses poured into the machine, commanding the infected computer to distribute millions of illegal spam e-mails.”

Then, by cross-referencing the sending IP address and the domains advertised in the spam with those in its vast corpus of spam culled from MSN and Hotmail spam-traps, Microsoft’s legal team was able to determine the origin of both the remote zombie commands, and the spam being sent through the zombies.

Then it did what any…

[Continue reading Microsoft Tracks Zombies to the Source, Sues Zombie Seeders and Spammers]

Tags: microsoft, spam, spam blockers, zombie attack, reverse-engineering