A Fresh, Highly Malicious Botnet Dismantled

A fresh botnet has been uncovered which researchers on Internet safety are apparently working towards shutting down. States Unveillance a security company that's working for the feat, the latest botnet is infecting PCs across 172 or more countries some of which are Russia, the U.S, UK, Brazil, Iran and China. SoftPedia published this on July 5, 2011.

A certain PC virus named Palevo is the malicious program that's energizing the botnet. It (Palevo) proliferates by typically abusing security flaws in Windows; making its own replicas on network shares and detachable storage devices; and dispatching itself through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and instant messages.

Recently, during early June 2011, reports from news outlets in Eastern Europe indicated that an investigation by law enforcement led to two men getting arrested over accusation that they stole hundreds of thousands dollars via running a botnet. The arrests were the result of a combined initiative called "Operation Hive" among the Interpol, FBI, the Slovenian Police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia.

Furthermore, officials have confiscated PCs as well as taken a few command-and-control domains from the total, offline, while the remaining domains continue to be live. Apparently, security researchers are still assessing the threat so they can device a technique for dismantling it.

Says Unveillance, the few domains, which are live, aggressively dig data that have been filched from victims having contaminated PCs. Currently, it isn't known whether agencies of law enforcement know about the live domains, while it's probable that a different group of individuals are regulating them who haven't still been taken into custody in pursuance of the investigation.

Meanwhile, during May 2011, security investigators at Trend Micro declared that Palevo carried out the same aggressive activity as it did prior to the shutdown of Mariposa. That was possibly the latest botnet's outcome, while Unveillance tried tracking the network.

Moreover, Meaghan Molloy and Matt Thompson, security researchers at Unveillance have once again united with Panda Security, their past partner for Mariposa Working Group towards gathering and evaluating thousands of distinct versions of the malware that's related to the new botnet. PRWeb reported this on June 28, 2011.

Related article: A New "Blackmailing" Variant Creeps Around…

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