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US shuts down a major cyber crime botnet
US AUTHORITIES have shut down one of the largest cyber theft botnets, which hijacked more than two million computers and stole over £61 million.
A criminal group used a Trojan virus called Coreflood that took over users' PCs, adding them to an extensive botnet. The Trojan was a keylogger that scoured for bank details and other personal information that might be useful to the criminals and uploaded the data to them.
This botnet has been in operation for at least a decade, but the US Department of Justice (DoJ) has revealed that it has now been taken down after the DoJ received court approval to seize the servers and domain names that made up the command and control centres of the malicious network.
Another element of the takedown of the Coreflood botnet was a series of commands that government programmers sent to hijacked computers that made up the network. The Trojan programs were ordered to stop transmitting data and shut down. This is the first time this approach has been used in the US, but it has been used before with good success by the Dutch.
It is believed that a Russian gang was behind the operation, which cost people many millions of dollars worldwide with most of the infected computers residing in the US, according to Reuters.
The DoJ said that 13 foreign nationals have been cited in a complaint for wire and bank fraud in connection with the botnet, and this could result in arrests and prosecutions.
This is the second major botnet taken down this year. Last month Microsoft led the charge against the infamous spam botnet Rustock. Hardware was seized and IP addresses were taken down, crippling the network and resulting in a sharp drop in the level of international spam. µ
Tags: Security
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Aren't most of the malware and crap run from the US? So why don't they shut those down since they are in their own backyard?
Oh wait, they need them to attack wikileaks and such.. all off the record of course... so they can claim it's 'those evil others' that engage in such behavior.
I know I sound like some paranoid person by my phrasing, but look at the traces of evidence they leaked, look at the patterns of attacks, and of course look at what they did in the past.
This is a big reason why I use GNU/Linux and work to clean the malware infection called Microsoft Windows from other people's computers, too. The Inq and the Register both have the stones to say "infected Windows PC's", unlike other so-called "mainstream" media funded by the Vole's advertising dollar$.
If you use Microsoft Windows, you are asking to be compromised. You are asking--even begging--for the Russian Business Network or the ChiComs to log all your keystrokes and empty your accounts.
--SYG