Zeus botnet temporarily disrupted, but back in full force

SearchSecurity.com: The Zeus botnet, a Trojan family widely used by cybercriminals to target victims with data-stealing malware, was temporarily disrupted this week after the ISP suspected of hosting its command-and-control servers was brought down. ... Kazakhstan-based Troyak.org, which harbors servers that control spam and malware botnets, went down temporarily on Tuesday. Troyak is considered to host 25% of the command-and-control servers that connect to Zeus infected computers. ScanSafe, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems Inc., identified a sharp uptick in malware traffic prior to the shutdown, indicating the bot herders may have known there would be a disruption to their operations. ..."The data seems to indicate they had some sort of advance warning and if so they would have had ample opportunity to update their bots," said Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, now part of Cisco.

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