With a Monday ruling by federal judge in Alexandria, Va., authorizing software bigwig Microsoft to shut down the Waledac botnet, a global network of hacker-controlled PCs, the company believes that the legal assault can potentially be a powerful weapon for combating cyber criminals.

Following a rare practice in civil cases like the one filed by Microsoft, the court order was issued under seal. The ruling gave Microsoft the authority to secretly break communications channels among the ‘botnet’ computers, before the hackers could restore contact with the PCs.

The restraining order from the court compelled VeriSign Inc., a company overseeing the registration of all domain names that end in “.com,” to temporarily deactivate as many as 270 suspect Internet addresses.

Though it is a well-known fact that hackers can easily misrepresent their identities when registering for Internet addresses, what is disquieting is that almost all the suspect registrants – which include the likes of Bestgoodnews. com, Movies4thjuly. com, and Lifegreetingcard. com, among a host of others - have listed contact information in China!

While Microsoft has been hailing the court order allowing the deactivation of domain names connected with the botnet - the Internet spam source that can send out up to 1.5 billion unsolicited emails per day; online rights groups have expressed the apprehension that the move might inadvertently result in the disruption of the activities of innocent computer users.