Takedown of Kelihos botnet gets chronicled

Earlier this week, Microsoft released aTillmann Wernern announcement about the disruption of a dangerous botnet that was responsible for spam messages, theft of sensitive financial information, pump-and-dump stock scams and distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Kaspersky Lab played a critical role in this botnet takedown initiative, leading the way to reverse-engineer the bot malware, crack the communication protocol and develop tools to attack the peer-to-peer infrastructure. We worked closely with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), sharing the relevant information and providing them with access to our live botnet tracking system.