Over Half a Million ZeroAccess Bots Sinkholed by Symantec

snoopy · Oct 2, 2013

Over Half a Million ZeroAccess Bots Sinkholed by Symantec
Symantec researchers have managed to sinkhole a total of over half a million bots of the ZeroAccess botnet. They might have been able to take down more, but the cybercriminals made some changes to the threat to make it more resilient.
ZeroAccess is one of the largest botnets in the world, with an estimate of 1.9 million bots. The botnet is designed to deliver payloads to infected computers, Bitcoin mining, and click fraud.

What makes ZeroAccess interesting besides its size is the fact that it uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) command and control (C&C) communications infrastructure. This makes it more difficult to disrupt.

Symantec researchers have been analyzing the botnet since March 2013 in an effort to identify a way to sinkhole it. Just as experts came up with a theory on how to achieve their goal, on June 29, cybercriminals released a new version of ZeroAccess.

The attack vector initially thought out by Symantec no longer worked on this new variant of the malware. It’s likely that the release of the new version was sparked by a research paper published in May, which analyzed the weaknesses in the P2P mechanism.

Researchers decided to go ahead with their plan and sinkhole as many bots as possible before the new version was rolled out completely.
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Full story here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Over...ccess-Bots-Sinkholed-by-Symantec-387437.shtml

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