Strike against cyber criminals

The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has deactivated the part of the network infrastructure hosted in Germany of a global botnet used by cybercriminals.

This measure was part of international investigations in Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, which were also supported by several IT companies. The working group "Joint Cybercrime Action Task Force (J-CAT)" of Europol's European Cybercrime Center (EC3) coordinated the joint action. According to current knowledge, 3,2 million computer systems worldwide were part of the so-called Ramnit botnet.

In a botnet, a large number of computers that have previously been infected with malware by cybercriminals are combined to form a criminal network. This allows the perpetrators to take over the computer systems unnoticed by the user and, for example, steal personal data such as passwords and bank information or disable the anti-virus protection. In the case of the "Ramnit botnet", the malware got onto the computer in various ways, for example via infected links in e-mails or simply when visiting infected websites.

For BKA President Holger M�nch, this procedure is further evidence of the dimension of criminal activity on the Internet: "The extent of this botnet, the number of over three million victims and the internationality of criminal activity underlines the importance of effective national and international cooperation between law enforcement agencies and alliances with business. This is the only way we can protect citizens from cybercriminals."

Users of the infected computers in Germany are informed by their providers in cooperation with the Federal Office for Information Technology (BSI).

(Frankfurter Rundschau February 25, 2015)

It's nice that the BKA can also do something other than federal Trojans.

Organized botnets only serve to suppress truths or - very popular with Eastern Europeans - to blackmail. When you consider that a handful of EMP bombs can shut down the power supply including the Internet in large parts of the world and the criminal pack then also become unemployed, rain without an eaves is no longer possible.

Leopold