The Inside Story of the Kelihos Takedown 83
Trailrunner7 writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft released an announcement about the disruption of the Kelihos botnet that was responsible for spam messages, theft of sensitive financial information, pump-and-dump stock scams, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. The botnet had a complex, multi-tiered architecture as well as a custom communication protocol and three-level encryption. Kaspersky Lab researchers did the heavy lifting, reversing the protocol and cracking the encryption and then sink-holing the botnet. The company worked closely with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), sharing the relevant information and providing them with access to our live botnet tracking system."
Re:Uhm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Such a sentiment kind of falls flat on its face when the 2 big corps in question are kind of undeniably the good guys in this story. Possibly save your bile for the next time a MS anti-trust issue comes up, but in this article kindly keep your trap shut.
Good actions should be lauded, not condemned by ignorant slashdotters.
Re:Microsoft cleans up the mess it created. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah because nobody else has a security problem with their software or setup.
http://kernel.org/ (How long has it been now?)
Wake me up when everyone grows up and realizes how hard our jobs truly are.
Re:Microsoft cleans up the mess it created. (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't even believe this type of garbage is still posted here. Here, let me enlighten you a bit. Windows is target of choice *because it is popular* and it has a *stable* API. The second tends to be a requirement for the former.
If another OS had cracked the 20% market share, you better believe it you would see it targeted too. OS X only recently is getting some attention here, but only by very minor group of criminals, after all, 7% does not constitute a large userbase.
Finally, ALL the exploits on desktop start off as exploits vs. one of the apps running, like Firefox or Office or Acrobat or whatever is popular.
I guess success is MS's fault, while "secure" OS X enjoys unpatched PDF exploits for years or iOS "handy" remote rooting, I mean jailbreaking, by simply visiting a website.