Obama Administration Seeks More Legal Power to Disrupt Botnets

The federal government is seeking more legal power to step in and shut down botnets through an amendment to the existing criminal law, which would allow the Department of Justice to obtain injunctions to disrupt these malicious networks. The Obama administration has proposed an amendment to...

Report: Q2 Threat Evolution, the Year of the Hacktivist?

Scareware and Rogue AV are back with a vengeance in 2011, after receding in 2010 according to Kaspersky Lab’s latest threat evolution report. According to the report, the rogue AV resurgence is significant not only in scope, which was substantial, with the Kaspersky Security Network KSN detecting...

FBI Begins Purging Coreflood Infected PCs

The FBI has issued some 19,000 uninstall commands to the computers of 24 individuals infected by the Coreflood botnet, effectively purging their machines of that malware, and leaving behind no unintended consequences thus far according to a report from Brian Krebs. This move was made possible by...

Coreflood Takedown Raises Questions About Offensive Actions Against Botnets

For just about as long as there have been botnets, there’s been an ongoing discussion in the security and law-enforcement communities about the legality and ethics of taking proactive steps to disrupt the botnets’ operations and even to remove the bots from infected machines. Until very recently,...

FBI vs Coreflood botnet

FBI vs Coreflood botnet The FBI's unprecedented effort to behead the Coreflood botnet—comprised of millions of hacked Windows machines—appears to be working, at least for now. The bureau has tracked a dramatic decline in the number of pings from the botnet since the takedown operation began earli...

FBI cracks International Bot Network !

FBI cracks International Bot Network ! The Department of Justice and FBI declared that it has cracked a network of hackers, who have infected almost 2 million computers with a harmful "bot" program, Coreflood that steals private and monetary data from computers. Identified as a "bot" network- as...

DOJ Shuts Down Botnet, Disables Infected Systems

The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI said on Wednesday that they had taken actions to disable an international botnet of more than two million infected computers that was stealing corporate data including user names, passwords and financial information. Thirteen unnamed “John Doe” defendent...