Denial of bot net service

IN A COORDINATED international endeavour, Spanish police and ISPs have destroyed the Mariposa botnet, a network of millions of hacked PCs, according to the Financial Times yesterday.

The Spanish police were joined by the FBI to help it track down the three-men accused of running the hacked network, who had taken valuable security and financial data from the US companies.

Apparently none of the three were terribly tech-savvy, since they relied on buying used malware. They rented out the Mariposa botnet to make money. It used file-sharing sites and dodgy web-links via MSN. Infected system had keylogging software installed along with Zeus, the most popular hacking attack Trojan used to compromise Internet banking.

It was not especially big or clever, but it still netted the men access to 12.7 million Internet addresses in 190 countries, thus the need to organise so many international agencies to bust it.

Spanish police were first alerted to the problem by a group of volunteers called the Mariposa Working Group. That team managed to disable Mariposa's command-and-control servers and handed over information about the criminals behind it to law enforcement in Spain and the US. µ