(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to a report published Thursday in the Globe and Mail, Internet security firms brought down a massive botnet, named Mariposa, this week, an effort that resulted in the arrest of three people by Spanish police, on charges related to cyber crime.
Emphasizing the involvement of the Canadian security firm Defense Intelligence (it being a Canadian newspaper), the Globe reports that the botnet controlled infected machines in approximately 190 countries, and appeared to be targeting government and corporate computers, with the aim of stealing sensitive data.
The report quotes Chris Davis, founder of Defense Intelligence, as saying that infected machines were found in about 65 percent of Fortune 1,000 firms, as well as banks and government organizations from around the world, the offices of leaders in several Asian countries and more than 1 million computers in Iran.
The company first spotted the botnet in May of 2009, and enlisted the aid of a group of partners that includes the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Spanish firm Panda Security, as well as the FBI and the Spanish Guardia Civil.
According to the report, the Mariposa botnet managed to acquire the personal information of more than 800,000 users.
The team of collaborating security experts was able to mostly neutralize the botnet in around December by blocking the domains that it controlled, and Spanish authorities were able to make the arrests when one of the operators led them to his house by attempting to access the botnet from his home computer.
While Mariposa has been mostly neutralized, says the report, the botnet continues to grow, and the prospect of informing infected users is daunting, says Davis.
