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

Hacking is hacking isn't it?

[PitViper401]

I know what they did is good and all, but didn't they still commit a crime themselves?

Re:Torpig

[syousef]

Why does this sound like a cross between an Onion and Swine Flu?

Take your pig...I mean pick:

- Huh? That's not how a knock knock joke starts!

- Because it shares much in common with self marinading swine flu.