In one of the bigger security news stories Microsoft struck a blow against an emerging botnet called Kelihos by using a legal tactic to take down the botnet's domain names.
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Microsoft got an order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, telling top-level domain registrar Verisign to take down the domain, on Sept. 22, but it was sealed until Monday. At that time, Dominique Piatti, who runs a domain-name business called Dotfree Group out of the Czech Republic, was served with a court summons in the case by Microsoft lawyers in the Czech Republic, according to IDG news. The site takedown occurred just after midnight, Pacific Time, last Monday.
Microsoft has used this legal tactic effectively in the past against the botnets Rustock and Waledec as well.
We can be glad that Microsoft lawyers are being put to good use in these cases! However, Microsoft apparently did get some help from Kaspersky Lab's global research analysis team in its takedown effort.
"Kaspersky Lab played a critical role in this botnet takedown initiative, leading the way to reverse engineer the bot malware, crack the communication protocol and develop tools to attack the peer-to-peer infrastructure," said Tillmann Werner, a senior virus analyst with Kaspersky in Germany. "We worked closely with Microsoft's Digital Crimes unit, sharing the relevant information and providing them with access to our live botnet tracking system."
Microsoft later said not crediting Kaspersky in its original announcement was the result of poor communication between the two companies. Of course, it was a Microsoft lawyer saying that…
Biometrics: Rapid advances in capturing face and iris biometrics, DNA
The Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa is an annual event that brings together the industry, including biometrics researchers and one main constituency, the U.S. government, especially the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation among other agencies.
The top news from there centered on remarkable advances being made in technologies that can capture iris and face scans of people in a crowd as they move, at a distance of about 5 meters or so. It's suggested that some of this on-the-go biometrics capture is going to be used in the fight against terrorism, and might even end up one day in automated war machines, a controversial subject…
Some other big news from the conference came in the form of companies and universities showing so-called "Rapid DNA" prototype kits that can accept a cotton swab with human DNA on it and spit out the individual subject's unique DNA profile in about an hour or two.
