CybersecurityRussia offers safe haven for a major botnet operator

Recently the FBI offered a reward of $3 million for any useful information which will lead to the apprehension of Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev. Bogachev is notorious for creating the Gameover Zeus botnet, which the FBI had successfully shut down in mid-2014, but the agency failed to capture Bogachev himself.

In early 2015 Bogachev managed to restore Zeus.

Bogachev and some members of his hacking crew now live in Russia, and the Russian government does not want to hand him or any of his hackers over to the United States to stand trial.

Gameover Zeus has been in operation for at least four years, and has developed different kinds of bank fraud. The hackers behind Zeus are believed to have stolen more than $100 million since 2011. Zeus has also been used as a means of getting money from PC owners by converting data on computers into an inaccessible code and later extorting big sums of money for the decryption key.

Botnets are a collection of compromised computers, known as zombies, which are controlled by the same hacker (botherder). A zombie is a computer affected by malware which causes it to do whatever the attacker – the botherder – wants it to do without the user’s knowledge. Computers are usually turned in zombies by visiting an infected website.

Strategy Page reports that for almost ten years the FBI, which considers the creators and operators of botnets to be criminals, has apprehended botnet operators and made them criminally liable, and also helped their victims wipe out the zombie software.

Experts estimate that on any given day, about ten million computers all over the world are zombiefied, often without owners’ knowledge. Botnets are most commonly used to steal information or dispatch malware to other computers to turn them into zombies.

Computer owners, even if they do not realize their computers have been turned into zombies, often notice that there is something wrong with their machine – programs are executed more slowly, or the computer freezes up often. There are software programs which trace and remove the hidden malware. Another way to deal with a zombie computer comuter is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the software.

Microsoft and Internet security firms are constantly improving their security software so that it can automatically detect and delete any malicious software.

Botherders typically hide in countries that have no extradition treaty with the United States – Russia being one such country.

“The most powerful Internet weapons on the planet are botnets,” Strategy Page concludes. “And many of them are getting into uniform. In wartime, many of these botnets would be turned into weapons. A botnet can be used to shut down essential military networks, or infect military computers with destructive (to the computer) software. This isn’t science fiction. It is real.”