The Department of Justice in a court filing has said that technical and legal measures it has undertaken to disrupt the GameOver Zeus botnet and Cryptolocker malware have proven successful, and that significant progress has been made in remediating computers infected with GameOver Zeus (which siphons user data such as banking credentials and hijacks machines, and is said to have accounted for over $100 million in theft).
In a status report filed with the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania – where it unsealed criminal charges against the administrator of GameOverZeus earlier this year and announced an international effort to shut it down – DoJ said all or nearly all of the computers infected with GameOver Zeus have been liberated from the criminals’ control and are now communicating exclusively with a substitute server established pursuant to a court order.
It also said traffic data from the substitute server shows that remediation efforts by Internet service providers and victims have reduced the number of computers infected with GameOver Zeus by 31 percent since the disruption commenced.
Further, DoJ saidCryptolocker(used to force victims to pay to have their files unlocked) has been neutralized by the disruption and cannot communicate with the infrastructure used to control the malicious software.