Huge criminal botnet crippled

Score one for the good guys. U.S. authorities last week took action against a huge criminal botnet.

A botnet is a network in which servers run for illicit purposes control home and office computers whose owners are unaware they have been compromised. Desktop computers, often with inadequate virus and network protection, become infected with programs that allow the machines to be controlled remotely by servers.

U.S. police and prosecutors seized servers in five states, and created their own server to attack and disable the larger network.

This particular botnet, known as Coreflood, was used by criminals to steal millions of dollars from owners of hundreds of thousands of infected computers. Data were stolen to allow identify theft of the owners. At its peak, this network was thought to have attacked two million computers worldwide. Keyloggers running on infected computers passed sensitive information such as banking passwords and credit card numbers to botnet operators.

No arrests have been made yet, but it’s possible that authorities know who they are looking for. Prosecutors filed court documents naming 13 “John Doe” defendants. Those anonymous names may be place holders, so as not to alert the criminals until authorities are ready to arrest them.

Let’s hope this makes a major impact against criminal botnets. Now, if only we could get clueless computer users to update their virus protection and secure their wireless routers.