Europol disrupts a Ramnit botnet campaign which had 3.2 zombie computers in Indonesia, India and other countries
Europol, the premier European investigating agency has disrupted a major cybercrime operation of Ramnit botnets. The Ramnit botnet had infected around 3.2 million computers worldwide with majority of them in Indonesia and India. It stole banking information by hacking more than 3 million computers and spread through phishing emails.
Europol said that it had conducted this operation with the assistance of investigators from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Britain. Europol was helped by 3 tech companies, AnubisNetworks, a unit of BitSight Technologies; Microsoft Corp and Symantec Corp, as well in dismantling the command and control server infrastructure used by the hackers.
“We worked together to shut down the command-and-control servers for the network in various countries across the European Union,” said Paul Gillen, head of operations at the ECC. “The criminals have lost control of the infrastructure they were using.”
Microsoft alongwith Washington-based Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center sought a court order in US court to shutdown the servers in a sealed lawsuit, Microsoft statement said. Acting on the investigations and armed with the court order, Europol and its allies seized servers in four countries and destroyed the botnet network.
India figured majorly in the infected zombie computers with almost 27 percent infections and Indonesia followed suit with 18 percent while the other countries Vietnam, the United States, Bangladesh and the Philippines followed.
The malware got installed through spear phishing links on spam email or malware laden websites and enabled the cyber criminals to control these 3.2 million PC for furthering their nefarious activities.
If you are worried that your PC may have been a part of this Ramnit botnet network you can get further information by visiting www.getsafeonline.org or www.cyberstreetwise.com and getting more information.
