One of the biggest leaps in malware technology has been the creation of botnets. I’ll talk about them in more detail later, but one recent botnet that we have had to deal with is a botnet called Gameover ZeuS. This particular malware virus is the predecessor of the ZeuS trojan horse with a few more tricks up it’s sleeve.

Created by a Russian man, people believe it was spread through the Cutwail botnet. But as far as what this trojan horse actually did was that it provided a backdoor for the Russian man - Evgenly Mikhailovich Bogachev - to steal money from peoples bank accounts. He made a point of stealing only from people who could actually afford it.

How he stole that money was via the distribution of the CryptoLocker ransomware - a program I’ll talk later. Getting into the specifics, basically the malware establishes a connection to the server and installs itself on the computer. It then proceeds to disable specific system processes, download and launch executables, essentially bricking the computer so you can’t do anything.

Even though this wasn’t affecting the public at large, it caught plenty of attention from police and international attention. Especially after the US Justice Department announced Operation Tovar which was designed to shut down Gameover ZeuS and block off communication and its command and control servers.

They’ve also indicted Bogachev in the US for creating a network of virus-infected computers and siphoning millions from people. Because of the severity, the FBI announced in 2015 a $3 million dollar reward - the highest reward for a cybercriminal - for information about Bogachev.