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Internet FBI Sting Nabs Botnet Kingpin Who Infected 12M+ Machines
07/30/2010
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Jason Mick - July 28, 2010
Computer crime doesn't pay in the long run
For malicious users, botnets represent one of the most lucrative get rich schemes. The premise is relatively straightforward -- craft a virus that exploits vulnerabilities in the most used operating systems and infect numerous machines. Once you have a mass of infected computers communicating with your command servers, they can be used as a for-hire army to perform such insidious tasks as mass spam mailing, mass theft of financial information, and denial of service attacks.
The key problem with the scheme is that its easy to spot and frequently is run by just a couple of individuals. Take down those individuals and you can take down the botnet. That's exactly the kind of breakthrough the FBI just made in the case of the botnet formed from the mariposa virus, also known as butterfly.
The mariposa virus first was launched in December 2008. The virus quickly infected computers on half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and at least 40 major banks.
Read the full article at DailyTech.com... |
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