The FBI received a court order which today allowed them to kill the hell out of a massive botnet by taking out a piece of malware called Coreflood.
Usually, when someone wants to shut down a botnet, they just, you know, shut it down by taking the servers that host it offline. But this recent action allowed them to really salt the earth, shutting down the actual software behind it. The feds haven’t been permitted to do this before – because the old idea was that it made them just as guilty of hacking as those big, bad botnet guys. [Ars Technica]