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Facebook Appreciates help from Greek Police in Deactivating Lecpetext Botnet

Facebook lately expressed gratitude to Greek Police because it assisted the company in terminating Lecpetext, one not so well-known spam spewing botnet, published ekathimerini.com, July 9, 2014.

Officials from Facebook and Greece stated that two individuals had been arrested on 3rd July, 2014 who had suspected association with Lecpetext. These individuals, apparently the botmasters, contaminated one-fourth of a million PCs using malicious software, which aided in filching credentials from Facebook and other websites, when the target systems went online. The malware also aided in planting Litecoin the virtual currency mining program, the officials added. Threatpost.com reported this, July 9, 2014.

Lecpetext's shutdown, notably, isn't so significant when compared with recent shutdowns that international authorities and Microsoft spearheaded, yet it does indicate how big technology firms keep holding interest in exterminating Internet crimes off their different products.

Threat Infrastructure Group of Facebook releasing one blog-post tells that a good 50,000 A/Cs on Facebook got impacted, while 250,000 PCs globally, especially within Norway, Poland, Greece, USA, Portugal and India, too were affected. Pcworld.com reported this, July 9, 2014.

Moreover, according to popular social-networking website Facebook's description, there was much difficulty in deactivating Lecpetext. The company said the botnet builders humiliated Facebook via missives they distributed through their bot-infected PCs.

Lecpetext's perpetrators initiated 20-or-more spam outbreaks during December 2013-June 2014, impacting several online services along with Facebook. A few victims received confidential missives having one '.zip' attachment with certain Visual Basic text or Java JAR document.

Those documents, in case run, regained more malware modules from distant websites. These modules comprised the popular 'remote access tool,' DarkComet capable of mining login credentials, alternatively different software samples, which harvested Litecoin.

Lecpetext often altered the malware laced attachments, thus making the filters of Facebook redundant. The same malware even eluded anti-virus programs via mechanically updating itself.

CEO James Foster at Baltimore-based social risk handling company ZeroFOX added that it was a lucid illustration from Lecpetext as to the way cyber-criminals had just shifted their focus on e-mail platforms utilized for many years onto widely-used social media websites for distributing their malware. Scmagazine.com published this, July 9, 2014.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/18/2014

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