The suspected mastermind of the Mariposa botnet that compromised millions of computers worldwide went on trial in Slovenia in 2012.
The 26 year old, MatjaÅ Åkorjanc is believed to have been a hacker known as Iserdo who was arrested in Maibor in 2010 following an International investigation by the FBI and Slovenian and Spanish Police.
The Mariposa Botnet – Overview
The Mariposa botnet was shutdown in 2009, however, it had silently recruited almost 13 million computers within over 190 countries.
The computers involved in the Mariposa botnet had been hijacked by hackers after they had been infected with the W32/Rimecud family of malware that spread itself via different methods including instant messaging, email and peer-to-peer software.
Once the computer was compromised as part of the Mariposa botnet, it was brought into the botnet allowing data to be reviewed and stolen by operators, including credit card and banking details as well as passwords.
Botnet Explained
A botnet consists of a number of devices with Internet connections that contain software to perform automated tasks using that connection that are normally simple and repetitive at a higher rate than could be conducted by a human. More than 50% of Internet traffic is bot activity.
Web Spidering (web crawling) is the process completed by the largest number of bots where an automated script fetches and analyzes information from web servers.
Botnets can also be used to perform DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, send spam and also enables the attacker to access the device and use its connection.
The owner is able to control the botnet remotely and the term Botnet is a combination of the words ‘robot’ and ‘network’.
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