Number: IRCNE2013021749
Date: 2013/02/07
According to “computerworld”, Microsoft and Symantec have dismantled a botnet that took over millions of computers for criminal activities such as identity theft and click fraud.
As many as 8 million computers were infected with Bamital over the past two years, wrote Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, in a blog post Wednesday.
It's the sixth botnet Microsoft has shut down in the past three years, and the second done in cooperation with Symantec, Boscovich wrote.
The Bamital code caused users to be shuffled to malicious websites even if they clicked on legitimate search results returned by Microsoft's Bing search engine, as well as those of Yahoo and Google, according to the lawsuit.
Bamital could also steal personal information from computers and conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks, which disrupt websites by bombarding them with too much traffic.
An effort to clean up the infected computers is under way. When people with infected computers complete a search query, they're directed to a Web page from Microsoft and Symantec that explains how to remove the malicious software.
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