Zeus botnet shaken by ISP cutoffs [ZDNet]
When is an ISP outage good news? When it takes out, albeit temporarily, the largest botnet currently operating on the Internet.
ZDNet reports that AS Troyak, a Kazakhstani ISP, had its upstream connection to the Internet repeatedly disabled on Wednesday of this week. Because several other service providers that rely on AS Troyak for their connections host command and control servers for the Zeus botnet, it's ability to communicate with thousands of computers under its control was interrupted for a while. Zeus is currently the largest botnet on the Internet in terms of numbers of systems under its control. Hackers use botnets for a number of nefarious activities, including sending spam and conducting distributed denial of service attacks on other Internet-connected systems.
According to this report, approximately 25 percent of the Zeus botnet was disabled by the AS Troyak outage. The number of domains under its control dropped from 249 to 149. But, the Zeus disconnection was short lived. The operators of the botnet were able to find other means to connect control servers to the Internet, and though the botnet was shaken for a short time, it continues to operate.
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