Among the major blights of the Internet today, botnets must rank pretty high. They are used to send spam (more than 90% of spam on the Internet has been sent through a botnet), launch denial of service attacks, operate pay-per-click fraud, steal data from users, etc.
Yet this Quarter has brought positive news in the effort to combat botnets; only positive mind, as to talk about good news would hardly be appropriate onsidering that as I write, there are still hundreds of botnets controlling millions of computers around the world.

In mid-February, NetWitness announced the dismantling of a botnet called Kneber.
This was widely reported in the media, given the startling nature of the statistics released: 75,000 computers infected across 2,500 organizations worldwide. Kneber was based on the infamous Zeus Trojan, which first appeared in 2007 and has been infecting users ever since.

By the end of the month, thanks to an action brought by Microsoft, a court order was issued to shut down the Internet connections of 277 domains used for sending commands to the Waledac botnet, one of the busiest and most notorious of the last two years, specialized in sending spam.

From Pandalabs Q1 2010 Quarterly Report.

Hope to see you there!

[..] With domain flux, each bot uses a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to compute
a list of domain names. This list is computed independently
by each bot and is regenerated periodically. Then, the bot attempts
to contact the hosts in the domain list in order until one succeeds,
i.e., the domain resolves to an IP address and the corresponding
server provides a response that is valid in the botnet’s protocol [..]

Here is the project web site.