Zero Access Botnet Down, But Not Out
Summary: Europol's European Cybercrime Center joined Microsoft and law enforcement from Germany, Latvia, Switzerland and the Netherlands to disrupt ZeroAccess, a botnet that infected more than two million PCs and forced them into click fraud. Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to unmask eight suspected operators and block traffic between infected US machines and 18 control servers, but researchers said the peer-to-peer botnet would likely keep running and operators could push a new plugin to restart the fraud.
Bottom line: The takedown hit only the servers delivering click-fraud instructions, and within a day the operators pushed a new 'z00clicker' template to the two million still-infected machines, showing that a P2P design with no single point of failure lets a botnet absorb a coordinated multinational action.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Cybercrime & Law Enforcement
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