Torpig Botnet Hijacked and Dissected

An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have hijacked the infamous Torpig botnet for 10 days. They have released a report (PDF) that describes how that was done and the data they collected. They observed more than 180K infected machines (this is the number of actual bots, not just IP addresses), collected 70GB of data stolen by the Torpig trojan, extracted almost 10K bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the underground market, and examined the privacy threats that this trojan poses to its victims. Considering that Torpig has been around at least since 2006, isn't it time to finally get rid of it?"

Comments

Re:uuh..yeah.

[VValdo]

Although we could have sent a blank conguration le to potentially remove the web sites currently targeted by Torpig, we did not do so to avoid unforeseen consequences (e.g., changing the behavior of the malware on critical computer systems, such as a server in a hospital). We also did not send a conguration le with a different HTML injection server IP address for the same reasons. To notify the affected institutions and victims, we stored all the data that was sent to us, in accordance with Principle 2, and worked with ISPs and law enforcement agencies, including the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI Cybercrime units, to assist us with this effort. This cooperation also led to the suspension of the current Torpig domains owned by the cyber criminals.

FTFA, they snaked a domain name they knew the botnet was going to use before the bad guys could, then just collected info sent to them by all the compromised systems.

The submission header and the body are encrypted using the Torpig encryption algorithm (base64 and XOR)

Torpig encryption algorithm: base64 and XOR. In contrast, Conficker uses all kinds of crypto (RC4, RSA, and MD-6).

W