French Police Remotely Removed RETADUP Malware from 850,000 Infected PCs
Aug 28, 2019
The French law enforcement agency, National Gendarmerie, today announced the successful takedown of one of the largest wide-spread RETADUP botnet malware and how it remotely disinfected more than 850,000 computers worldwide with the help of researchers. Earlier this year, security researchers at Avast antivirus firm, who were actively monitoring the activities of RETADUP botnet, discovered a design flaw in the malware's C&C protocol that could have been exploited to remove the malware from victims' computer without executing any extra code. However, to do that, the plan required researchers to have control over the malware's C&C server, which was hosted with a hosting provider located in the Ile-de-France region in north-central France. Therefore, the researchers contacted the Cybercrime Fighting Center (C3N) of the French National Gendarmerie at the end of March this year, shared their findings, and proposed a secret plan to put an end to the RETADUP vir...
