Posted on Thursday, 14th April 2011 by Nathan Thorpe
The U.S. Justice Department said it disabled a “massive fraud scheme” that infected more than 2 million computers worldwide with malicious software.
The department filed a civil complaint, criminal seizure warrants and issued a temporary restraining order in coordinated action with Microsoft Corp., which issued a software patch April 12 to correct a vulnerability in its Windows operating system. The vulnerability allowed the software to spread from one computer to another creating a so-called botnet.
The action was aimed at software called Coreflood, which collects passwords and financial information that was used by criminals, the Justice Department said in a statement yesterday. The group of computers infected with Coreflood, known as the Coreflood botnet, is suspected by the U.S. of operating for almost a decade and infecting more than 1.8 million computers in the U.S. alone.
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Tags: Fraud
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