Simda Botnet Successfully Busted In a Joint Operation

Threatpost.com reported on 13th April, 2015 stating that the Simda botnet, which is known for distributing banking malware and dropping a backdoor on hundreds of thousands of machines across the world, was taken down on 9th April, 2015 by a joint effort of international law enforcement bodies and private security and technology companies.

The operation involved officers of National High Tech Crime Unit of Netherlands, FBI of US, Luxembourg's Police Grand-Ducale Section Nouvelles Technologies, Russia's Ministry of Interior Cybercrime Department "K". INTERPOL also collaborated with Kaspersky Lab, Microsoft, Trend Micro and Japan's Cyber Defense Institute for technical support.

The botnet is supposed to have infected more than 770,000 computers and it has been found in more than 190 countries across the world with US, Canada, Russia and United Kingdom as the worst affected countries.

Researchers of Kaspersky Lab say that fourteen command and control servers in five countries were seized making a malware family over which infected more than 90,000 computers since January 2015 alone.

Simda has been active since the end of 2012 and it distributed many types of malware including illicit software and financial Trojans. The guardians of Simda make frequent functionality updates and continue to increase its capabilities to avoid detection by researchers and security softwares because of which cybercriminals are attracted towards this option who buy only access to machines infected with Simda and then install more malicious code on the machines.

ZDNet.com published news on 13th April, 2015 quoting Sanjay Virmani, Director of IDCC (INTERPOL Digital Crime Centre), as saying "the success of the operation illustrates the value and necessity of collaborations between national and international law imposing bodies with private industry to deal with online crime."

Virmani said that this operation has created a substantial blow to Simda and INTERPOL would constantly work to help its member countries to protect their netizens from cybercriminals and to detect other evolving threats.

European law-enforcement agencies teamed up with private companies to shut down Simda botnet and another botnet, known as Beebone, which is a smaller and more mysterious network of compromised systems. In both the cases, Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit played a very important role.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/18/2015