U.S. and European law enforcement agencies have shut down a highly sophisticated piece of the botnet that had infected more than 12,000 computers worldwide, allowing hackers to steal victims’ banking information and other sensitive data.
The law enforcement agencies from the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union conducted a joint operation to get rid of the botnet across the globe and seized the command-and-control server that had been used to operate the nasty Beebone (also known as AAEH) botnet.
What’s a Botnet?
A botnet is a network of large number of computers compromised with malicious software and controlled surreptitiously by hackers without the knowledge of victims.
Basically, a "botnet" is a hacker’s "robot" that does the malicious work directed by hackers.
Hackers and Cyber Criminals have brushed up their hacking skills and started using Botnets as a cyber weapon to carry out multiple crimes such as DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service), mass spamming, advertising revenue manipulation, cyber espionage, mining bitcoins, surveillance etc.
However, this is not first time we hear about a sophisticated botnet took down by law enforcement agencies.
Just two months ago, law Enforcement took down Ramnit botnet, which infected over 3.2 Million computers worldwide, and last year the FBI and Europol torn down the GameOver Zeus botnet, although it came back a month after its took down. Read Full Article