Taking Over the Torpig Botnet

Via The Computer Security Group at UCSB -

Botnets, networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims.

At the beginning of 2009, we took control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected.

Brett Stone-Gross, Marco Cova, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Bob Gilbert, Martin Szydlowski, Richard Kemmerer, Chris Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna, "Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover," UCSB Technical Report, Santa Barbara, CA, April 2009.