On November 8, a long-living botnet of more than 4,000,000 bots was taken down by the FBI and Estonian police in cooperation with Trend Micro and a number of other industry partners. In this operation, dubbed “Operation Ghost Click” by the FBI, two data centers in New York City and Chicago were raided and a…
Read MoreIt’s botnet takedown season again and this time around, CoreFlood bit the dust. As is most often the case nowadays, this botnet was exclusively built to steal its victims’ personal and financial information. The takedown was facilitated by the U.S. Department of Justice and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This is a great…
Read MoreWho said that Cutwail/Pushdo botnet is dead? The recent Cutwail/Pushdo takedown was a great help in stopping this huge botnet in sending out spammed messages all over the world. Yesterday, however, a new wave of approximately 5,000 fake Facebook messages was sent through some Cutwail zombies for about 30 minutes. The spammed message informs users…
Read MoreEarly this week, the KOOBFACE Command and Control (C&C) servers issued a new command to its downloader component. This new command identifies a list of IP addresses to be used by the downloader component as Web or relay proxies to retrieve subsequent commands and components. In the old KOOBFACE architecture (see Figure 1), the downloader…
Read MoreApril 2016 was a great month for putting cybercriminals in prison. On April 12 Paunch, the creator of the infamous Blackhole exploit kit, was sentenced to seven years in a Russian prison. This was soon followed by Aleksandr Panin, the creator of SpyEye: he was sentenced by a United States federal court to nine and a half years in prison for his role in creating SpyEye. One of his partners, Hamza Bendelladj, was sentenced to fifteen years.
The most recent case involved Esthost, a company we know very well from our research. Vladimir Tsastsin became the latest member of the Esthost gang to be sentenced to jail; he will spend more than 7 years in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $2.5 million in property.
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