Dutch botnet creators arrested, their Shadow botnet neutralized
The Dutch botnet called Shadow which seems to have affected 150,000 victim computers has been neutralized by the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit with the help of Kaspersky Labs. The 16 and 19 years old creators have been arrested. The botnet has seemingly been (ab)using windows Live Messenger to contact its victim machines’ users via a message (that’d appear as being from a friend) asking the user to visit a link, which in turn would download a file and hence infect his machine once run.
Shadow apparently had a majority of its victims in Netherlands, and all the messages etc were sent in Dutch, but there could be many victims worldwide.
What’s so cool about the story is that the Crime Unit didn’t just shut down the network, with the help of Kaspersky Labs, they notified all the infected machine users about Shadow botnet and how their PC was infected. A fix has been released on Kaspersky’ site. And the victims will be notified about the fix via the Shadow botnet itself.
[via Gizmodo]
