Global Bot Network ‘Dorkbot’ Busted and Taken Down

There are two well-known groups that both use the name Dorkbot, one being a great group of organizations that sponsor grassroots meetings of artists, engineers, designers, scientists, inventors, and anyone else working under the very broad term ‘electronic art’. The other one is part of the dark side and it is, or rather was, a large bot network of worms that spread through instant messaging, USB drives, websites, and social media sites.

The Dorkbot network has been watched since 2011 and had over a million systems infected with 80,000 to 120,000 more each month according to Microsoft. But now the law enforcement agencies around the world have put a stop to it thanks to the FBI, European Cybercrime Center, and the Interpol Digital Crime Center while being assisted by Microsoft in tracking down the control servers.

The network was stealing pretty much anything it could get it hands on such as Facebook and Gmail credentials, Netflix accounts, but also PayPal and other payment credentials. This is just the latest in many botnets that have been cracked lately and it is nice to see the officials doing something about this nuisance of hackers that plague the internet. At the same time, senates and legislators are trying to push for harder penalties for operators and users of botnets.

At the time of writing, there was no news whether they had any leads on who was behind the network and controlling it or whether they just managed to take down the network itself.