So what are we waiting for? Take ’em down!
A security researcher has discovered a potentially crippling vulnerability in one of the most widely used botnet toolkits, a finding that makes it easy for blackhats and whitehats alike to take control of huge networks of infected PCs.
The flaw in the Zeus crimeware kit makes it trivial to hijack the C&C, or command and control, channels used to send instructions and software updates to compromised computers that often number in the hundreds of thousands. There are in turn thousands or tens of thousands of botnets that are spawned from Zeus, and the vast majority are susceptible to the technique.
That means the bug could make takedowns by law enforcement and rival crime gangs significantly easier, said Billy Rios, the researcher who discovered the defect and has written a simple program to exploit it.
Link : The Register – Zeus botnets’ Achilles’ Heel makes infiltration easy