Topic: Torpig Botnet Hijacked and Dissected

[sam]

A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have hijacked the infamous Torpig botnet for 10 days. They have released a report (PDF) that describes how that was done and the data they collected. They observed more than 180K infected machines (this is the number of actual bots, not just IP addresses), collected 70GB of data stolen by the Torpig trojan, extracted almost 10K bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the underground market, and examined the privacy threats that this trojan poses to its victims. Considering that Torpig has been around at least since 2006, isn't it time to finally get rid of it?

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/04/0212214

[Simon]

Yes, why can't they use their knowledge to just kill it?

[GillE]

Considering the number of bank account details which have been lifted (and there are many other trojans extracting exactly the the same information), it's curious that the world banking system hasn't been hammered by these pirates.  Perhaps they're better at writing software than they are at committing fraud;  it takes a proper financier to do that.

[Simon]

I think, half the time, it's the thrill of the chase, rather than the catch, with these hackers, Gill. 

[sam]

I'm unsure why they haven't been able to kill it! I guess the machines infected will still be accessible though

[Simon]

True.