Symantec and Microsoft take down Cybercrime network – Bamital botnet

In a recent blog post on the Symantec website, they discuss how they worked with Microsoft to combat a botnet that has been infecting computers for over 4 years: 

From Symantec Blog Post:

Today we are pleased to announce the successful takedown of the Bamital botnet. Symantec has been tracking this botnet since late 2009 and recently partnered with Microsoft to identify and shut down all known components vital to the botnet’s operation.

Bamital is a malware family whose primary purpose is to hijack search engine results, redirecting clicks on these results to an attacker controlled command-and-control (C&C) server. The C&C server redirects these search results to websites of the attackers’ choosing. Bamital also has the ability to click on advertisements without user interaction. This results in poor user experience when using search engines along with an increased risk of further malware infections.

Bamital’s origin can be tracked back to late 2009 and has evolved through multiple variations over the past couple of years. Bamital has primarily propagated through drive-by-downloads and maliciously modified files in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. From analysis of a single Bamital C&C server over a six-week period in 2011 we were able to identify over 1.8 million unique IP addresses communicating with the server, and an average of three million clicks being hijacked on a daily basis. Recent information from the botnet shows the number of requests reaching the C&C server to be well over one million per day.

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