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Microsoft’s secret battle against the Tor botnet
In August 2013, 4 million infected computers woke up and waited instructions from their master.
The pathogen was Sefnit, a nasty bit of malware that makes infected computers mine bitcoins. Once the computers woke up, they worked under the command of Ukranian and Israeli hackers named Scorpion and Dekadent. The malware communicated with the two by downloading Tor, the powerful anonymizing software, and talking over encrypted channels. It was the first time a botnet, as a collection of slave computers is called, used Tor in such a potentially powerful way.
By using an unconventional method to exploit Windows, the hackers unwittingly forced Microsoft to show a hand few knew it had: The ability to remotely remove progams en masse from people’s computers, without them even knowing it.
All of a sudden, the anonymous network grew from about 1 million users to 5.5 million, a jump that frightened even Tor’s developers.
“If this had been a real attacker, if the botnet had been turned against the Tor network, it probably would have been fatal, I think,” developer Jacob Appelbaum said in a speech at the Chaos Communication Congress in December.
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/01/microsofts-secret-battle-against-the-tor-botnet/
