Kelihos Botnet with 110,000 PCs take down finally
Mar 29, 2012
Kelihos Botnet with 110,000 PCs take down finally Botnets are particularly insidious, using thousands of virus-infected computers which their owners are unaware are being used for sending out spam, launching denial-of-service attacks and stealing data.But taking down a botnet poses challenges. The main problem is that legitimate security companies can't use the same type of weapons as criminals. A group of malware experts from security companies Kaspersky Lab, CrowdStrike, Dell SecureWorks and the Honeynet Project, have worked together to disable the second version of the Kelihos botnet, which is significantly bigger than the one shut down by Microsoft and its partners. Kelihos is used to send spam, carry out DDoS attacks, and steal online currency such as bitcoin wallets. It operates as a so-called "peer-to-peer" bot network, which are more difficult to take down than those with a centralized command and control servers (C&C), according to Tillmann Werner, a senior