Now while the seizure of these C&C Servers is great the actual impact the seizure had was minimal. According to reports from Sophos and other services that monitor the status of current generation Bots nets the traffic between infected systems and C&C servers has not decreased. Of course it is estimated that there are over 13 million infected systems (Zeus or a variant) on the internet and the two botnets brought down this weekend could have only controlled a small portion of them.
So while Microsoft can claim a victory today, they have a long way to go in the war on malware like Zeus. It is also important to note that it is possible to buy full kits ready to create your own botnet using Zeus or a variant if you have enough money. There have even been links to what appears to be an open source kit as well. This means that there is little chance that Zeus has gone away for good. Instead we are likely to continue to see Zeus hanging out and grabbing financial information as other hackers “tweak” it to make it a more efficient system.
Source Microsoft Blog
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Monday, 26 March 2012 19:31
Microsoft puts a Small Dent in the Zeus Family of Botnets
Written by Sean KalinichReading time is around minutes.
Microsoft has scored a fairly important (if somewhat small) victory over some of the real cyber criminals out there. This morning they announced that through a joint effort with the US Marshals, Multiple Financial organizations they were able to bring two Zeus botnets down over the weekend. This was accomplished by seizing the command and control servers for this particular group. The Zeus family of malware has been responsible for millions of dollars in losses due to the theft of banking information.
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