Decade Old Botnet Coreflood Gets Busted In The US

The Justice Department of US and FBI announced that they have successfully disabled the zombie like botnet “Coreflood” and seized the servers. Cyber criminals were using this huge network of virus infested computers for illegal activities like password thefts and unauthorized access to financial documents. Millions of dollars were stolen by the hackers and cyber criminals using this botnet. It is believed that Coreflood has been in existence for around 10 years and during this time span, almost 2 million computers had fallen prey to it. 1#-Link-Snipped-#3 suspects have been identified in this international racket and court papers have been filed against them for serious charges like wire fraud, bank fraud and illegal interception of electronic communications. All these suspects are foreigners but their identities and nationalities are yet to be disclosed. This can be considered as one of the best enforcement procedure taken by the US authorities against an international botnet. In this operation, about 29 Internet domain names and 5 controlling computer servers were captured.

A botnet is a network of computers which are affected by some malware and it can be manipulated and accessed by some remote computer through internet. The Coreflood took advantage of a weakness in the security of computer systems using Microsoft Windows OS was specially equipped for stealing passwords, financial information, personal data, etc. from the infected machines. It had infected 2.33 million computers including 1.85 in USA till February 2010. The botnet makes the infected PCs to auto save and record the keystrokes and Internet communications including online banking credentials. This stolen data, including online banking credentials and passwords of innocent victims was used to carry out internet banking transactions. A few major victims that were robbed by the Coreflood include a real estate firm in Michigan robbed for $115,771 in decietful wire transfers, an investment and consulting agency in North Carolina hit for $151,201 and a defense contractor in Tennessee which was cheated for $241,866. So beware of these botnets which can bankrupt you in seconds.

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