Recently Microsoft convinced a US judge to issue a court order shutting down 277 internet domains infected with malware and being used by the Waledac botnet. It is estimated that 80% of unsolicited email originates from botnets and an estimate of 1.5 billion spam messages were being sent from these “zombie” computers everyday. In many cases the owners of these machines were entirely unaware that their computer was infected at all. Upon receiving the permission of US courts to disrupt this system, Microsoft severed the connection to most of these computers and cut off traffic to Waledac’s website. The effect of this action is however unclear as experts are divided as to the degree to which this has reduced worldwide spam proliferation. Richard Cox, the cheif information officer at the anti-spam service known as Spamhaus was quoted as saying “Waledac was not a high threat, its less than 1% of spam traffic.” Regardless public opinion is virtually unanimous in condoning this step as a favorable one. I personally see this as a small step towards success in the war against spam e-mail, but I am pessimistic about it having any long lasting effects. Spam it seems is the unintended negative consequence associated with the convenience of e-mail. People have resigned themselves to, in many cases, having to spend ten of fifteen minutes each day sifting through the morass of junk mail. As the world shifts away from the tangible mail of the past towards electronic mail the effects of this spam will become all the more widespread. True elimination of this problem would, however, require giving a few individuals a large degree of control over the internet, which many people are not willing to do at the moment. Perhaps, however, as more and more people turn to email as a main source of communication these attitudes towards spam will shift and harsher measures will be taken.

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