Sophos Claimed that Approx 1 Million PC’s are a Part of ZeroAccess Global Botnet

Malware called ZeroAccess is presently available on over 1 Million PCs spread across in 200 countries globally. Even worse, by now, the threat was reported to be installed in more than 9 Million times on the device of unsuspecting users of internet. As per the new research report, "The ZeroAccess Botnet -Mining and Fraud for heavy financial gain," published by Sophos security firm.

After being compromised by entering into a malicious webpage that can be from rampant blogs to daily news site, users become contaminated with ZeroAccess Trojan that spoils the un-patched programs on their system and then the machine is a part of botnet and capable of receiving orders from command-and-control servers.

Same as the maximum of botnet, the main motive behind this is financial gain. As per the Sophos lab report, the two basic methods employed are click fraud, unintentionally click on an ad frequently to drive up limited hits, and bitcoin mining a method of stealing virtual currency through a machine's computational power.

"If running at the highest ability the ZeroAccess botnet is able to fetch a good amount of money: apart from of $100,000 a day," blogged Senior Threat Researcher, James Wyke Sophos in a statement published by nakedsecurity.sophos.com on September 20, 2012.

Although much change are incorporated in the root kit, still it plays a malware delivery platform. The changes include a new autostart characteristic, new P2P protocol, and filed stored in another location, that clubs into the registry, and the utilization of a user-mode root kit in 32-bit windows.

After examining the threat (ZeroAccess) for a period of two months, Sophos was capable to locate the locations of the contaminated machines. It seems that, the malware has discovered to pollute computers in various locations that were minimum expected. Example includes Kiribati and various other islands in the middle of Pacific Ocean.

Nevertheless, most of the impure machines seem to be in the United States (55%), Germany, Turkey, Canada, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Japan and Austria.

Users who desire to defend themselves against the malware are suggested to launch a famous AV solution and maintain it always, as most of them found the several ZeroAccess types, suggested Sophos.

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» SPAMfighter News - 10/1/2012