The gang most likely began by hiring spam specialists to send out e- mail and social- networking posts to lure recipients into clicking on a tainted Web link, says Don Jackson, senior researcher at SecureWorks.
Why becoming a data thief is all too easy
They then used a dated free version of a hacking tool called ZeuS and did nothing to hide their tracks, indicating that “they're probably amateurs," Jackson says.
That disclosure underscores how deeply cybercriminals -- from novices to elite gangs -- have now saturated the Internet with infections that allow them to take full control of Windows PCs. Cybergangs slot newly infected PCs, called bots, into networks called botnets. On any given day, 12% to 15% of the 1.6 billion computers connected to the Internet are bots, according to security firm Damballa.
Botnets are the engines that drive cybercrime, ranging from petty scams to espionage. “We've become desensitized to botnet infestation," says Tim Belcher, NetWitness chief technology officer.
In late January, NetWitness began tracking data exchanges between a bot in one of its client's networks and a remote server. Investigators accessed the server and found some 68,000 user name and password pairs for an array of online accounts. The data were stolen from 75,000 botted PCs in 2,411 organizations from 196 countries.
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