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August 29, 2019 02:03 am

Cops Hijack Botnet, Remotely Wipe Malware From 850,000 Computers

French police, with help from an antivirus firm, took control of a server that was used by cybercriminals to spread a worm programmed to mine cryptocurrency from more than 850,000 computers. Once in control of the server, the police remotely removed the malware from those computers. Motherboard reports: Antivirus firm Avast, which helped France's National Gendarmerie cybercrime center, announced the operation on Wednesday. Avast said that they found that the command and control server, which was located in France, had a design flaw in its protocol that made it possible to remove the malware without "making the victims execute any extra code," as the company explained in its lengthy report. Cybersecurity firms such as Avast, as well as Trend Micro, had been tracking the worm, called Retadup, since last spring. Most of the infected computers were used by the malware authors to mine the cryptocurrency Monero, but in some cases it was also used to push ransomware and password-stealing malware, according to Avast. As the antivirus firm reported, most Retadup victims were in South America, with Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico at the top of the list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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