The Bamital Botnet Bust Takes an Interesting Turn

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Microsoft and Symantec disclosed that they have successfully (they believe) shut down the Bamital botnet, which was netting at least $1 million a year for the perpetrators.
• The companies went beyond the usual legal and technical responses, employing the botnet’s own mechanisms to inform targeted users that their systems had been infected to carry out so-called ‘click fraud.’

Where there is a will, there always seems to be a way when it comes to hackers using new techniques and variations on old methods to breach systems for their own gain.  This is what makes the IT security discipline as relentlessly frustrating as it is endlessly challenging.  No matter how innovative IT security technologies become and practices evolve, determined cybercriminals seem to be finding new ways to penetrate even the best enterprise defenses.