Microsoft revealed on Wednesday that it gained a court order that compelled VeriSign, the .com registry, to remove 277 ".com" names from its rolls, effectively cutting off communication between the Waledac's controllers and their infected machines. The legal action is unprecedented at the domain name level, said Andre' M. DiMino, co-founder of The Shadowserver Foundation, a group that tracks botnets and helped take down Waledac. In June 2009, a federal court ordered the shutdown of 3FN, a rogue ISP supplying connectivity to botnets such as Pushdo and Mega-D, but this appears to be the first major action at the domain-name level. "It's definitely pretty groundbreaking," DiMino said. "To disable and disrupt a botnet at this level is really pulling the weed out by the root." But behind the scenes, Microsoft's legal action was just one component of a synchronized campaign to bring down Waledac. Last year, researchers with the University of Mannheim in Germany and Technical University Vienna in Austria published a research paper showing how it was possible to infiltrate and control the Waledec botnet. They had studied Waledac's complicated peer-to-peer communication mechanism. Microsoft -- which was annoyed by Waledec due to its spamming of Hotmail accounts -- contacted those researchers about two weeks ago to see if they could perform their attack for real, according one of the University of Mannheim researchers, who did not want to be identified. "They asked me if there was also a way besides taking down those domains of redirecting the command-and-control traffic," said the Mannheim researcher. Waledac distributes instructions through command-and-control servers that work with a peer-to-peer system. Led by a researcher who did his bachelor thesis on Waledac, the action began early this week. "This was more or less an aggressive form of what we did before," the Mannheim researcher said. "We disrupted the peer-to-peer layer to redirect traffic not to botmaster servers but to our servers." At the same time, Microsoft's legal efforts brought down domain names that were used to send new instructions to drones. The result has been dramatic: Up to 90 percent of the infected machines, which amount to at least 60,000 computers, are now controlled by researchers, half of which are in the U.S. and Europe and the rest scattered around the globe.
Mark Frisse on 24 Aug 10his article explains why supplying data to researchers is set to become a profitable line of business for entities that hold large stores of health data in electronic form. Health information systems are a form of infrastructure, and Congress's cost-based fee for data preparation and transmission echoes pricing schemes traditionally used in other infrastructure industries such as railroads, electric power transmission, and telecommunications. Cost-based fees for infrastructure services, of constitutional necessity, must allow recovery of operating and capital costs including a return on invested capital-in other words, a profit margin. This fee structure is being launched in an emerging 21st-century research landscape where biomedical discovery will depend more than it has in the past on studies that harness existing stores of data-such as insurance claims and healthcare data-that were created for purposes other than the research itself. This article explores why, in this environment, the new fee structure has the potential to destabilize already-fragile public trust and invite state-law responses that could override key provisions of federal privacy regulations, with devastating consequences for researchers' future access to data. To avoid this outcome, the cost-based fee must be thoughtfully implemented and accompanied by reform of the HIPAA waiver provision now used to approve nonconsensual use of people's health data in research. This article identifies specific defects of the existing framework for approving nonconsensual uses of data with the aim of eliciting a wider debate about what the reforms ought to be.
