Bot masters in cut-throat DDoS fight
Botnet operators in the criminal underground are launching large denial of service attacks against each other in a bid to knock out rivals in the race to compromise computers.
Security researchers have discovered command and control servers owned by operators of Zeus botnets were blasted by those running a rival Cutwail botnet in a distributed denial of service attack reaching 300,000 connections a minute.
The infamous Zeus malware was a trojan often used to steal banking information and install cyrptolocking software. The Zeus family was considered to be the largest botnet operating on the internet. Cutwail is also an established botnet which is typically involved in sending spam via the Pushdo trojan, at its peak pushing out millions of emails a day.
