Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the company teamed up with Symantec to shut down the criminal Bamital botnet that had infected over eight million computers with malware. The efforts included raids on web hosting facilities in Virginia and New Jersey.
This week, Microsoft offered an update on their efforts to clean up the effects of the Bamital botnet. As of February 18th, Microsoft said that 32 percent of the PCs that were a part of the botnet are no longer connected to the network. The company said:
This promising reduction rate is largely due to the takedown of the botnet and victims taking action in response to the proactive notification process and available cleanup tools. We expect that the number of victim notifications and cleaned computers will improve as we fine-tune our process over the course of the next several weeks.
Microsoft also said that it has signed a settlement agreement with a person known only as "John Doe 12" for his involvement in the botnet. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Microsoft also secured a positive legal decision in the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that will enable the company to keep the domains that the Bamital botnet used shut down, along with pointing any infected PCs to Microsoft’s domain name system.
Microsoft said the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) played a major role in taking down the botnet. It will continue to work with other such response teams and ISPs to free all the other PCs of the botnet's malware.
Source: Microsoft blog | Image via Microsoft
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