Symantec researchers sinkhole Bitcoin mining Zero Access botnet horde
Researchers from Symantec have successfully sinkholed a significant proportion of the infamous Zero Access botnet, rescuing hundreds of thousands of the 1.9 million victims from the scam's zombie masters.
Symantec reported details of the operation after discovering a way to sinkhole an early version of the Zero Access botnet. The firm claimed that despite not working on an evolved version of the malicious program, the operation managed to detach over 500,000 machines from the zombie network.
"This operation quickly resulted in the detachment of over half a million bots and made a serious dent to the number of bots controlled by the botmaster. In our tests, it took an average of just five minutes of P2P activity before a new Zero Access bot became sinkholed," read the blog post.
