Blood-sucking botnet narrowly escapes extermination, lives to leech again

A highly resilient botnet conservatively estimated to generate about $700,000 per year in fraudulent advertising revenue narrowly escaped a shutdown engineered by whitehats from security firm Symantec.

Symantec researchers have estimated that ZeroAccess, until recently a network of about 1.9 million infected computers, generates about 1,000 fraudulent clicks per day on each machine it controls. It also harnessed the electricity and hardware at the disposal of compromised machines to carry out the mathematical operations required to “mine” bitcoins. The unusually large footprint combined with the high collective cost on advertisers and PC owners made ZeroAccess one of the most menacing botnets in current circulation. Symantec researchers set out to “sinkhole” the botnet by taking control of the command-and-control mechanism botmasters use to send and receive data from individual bots.

SOURCE: arstechnica.com