Media Coverage

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Justice Department today announced a multi-national effort to disrupt the GameOver Zeus botnet—a global network of infected victim computers used by cyber criminals to steal millions of dollars from businesses and consumers—and unsealed criminal charges in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Omaha, Nebraska, against an administrator of the botnet. In a separate action, U.S. and foreign law enforcement officials worked together to seize computer servers central to the malicious software, or malware, known as Cryptolocker, a form of ransomware that encrypts the files on victims’ computers until they pay a ransom

Law enforcement agencies in Europe and the United States, including Europol and the FBI, ran a coordinated takedown of the  GameOver Zeus botnet on Friday, seizing servers and disrupting the botnet’s operation.

Businesses could get better intelligence on the spam and phishing campaigns targeting their customers after the government communications watchdog provided spam-fighting organisation ShadowServer access to its Spam Intelligence Database.

The founder of Liberty Reserve, a digital currency that has evolved as perhaps the most popular form of payment in the cybercrime underground, was reportedly arrested in Spain this week on suspicion of money laundering. News of the law enforcement action may help explain an ongoing three-day outage at libertyreserve.com: On Friday, the domain registration records for that site and for several other digital currency exchanges began pointing to Shadowserver.org, a volunteer organization dedicated to combating global computer crime.

Microsoft has reached a settlement with the Chinese site linked to the Nitol DDoS botnet. The emerging Nitol botnet was hosted by the 3322.org domain. In order to stem the threat, Microsoft filed a suit to take control of the 70,000 malicious subdomains hosted on 3322.org, gaining control of the domain in mid September.

Virgin Media subscribers whose computers are part of a botnet can expect a letter warning them to tighten up their security, under a new initiative based on data collected by independent malware trackers. The UK’s third-largest ISP will match lists of compromised IP addresses collected by the Shadowserver Foundation, among others, to its customer records.

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting …

There is a group of security professionals that volunteer their time — lots of time — to rid the Internet of cybercrime. Discover how they are making a difference.

Today the IWM and the Shadowserver Foundation have released a report “Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage 2.0” (mirror) in which we document another targeted malware network. (NYT coverage here).

Four days ago, top-notch computer security researchers launched an assault on Waledac, a highly sophisticated botnet responsible for spreading spam and malicious software. As of Thursday, more than 60,000 PCs worldwide that have been infected with malicious code are now under the control of researchers, marking the effort one of the most highly successful coordinated against organized cybercrime.