Today, federal officials announced new charges against the GameOver Zeus botnet, together with coordinated seizures that appear to have stopped the network cold. GameOver Zeus infected as many as a million Windows computers, harvesting user credentials and executing fradulent wire transfers. Today’s federal complaint named Russia’s Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev as mastermind of the network, tracked down with the help of law enforcement agencies across eleven countries.
“Gameover Zeus is the most sophisticated botnet the FBI and our allies have ever attempted to disrupt,” the FBI’s Robert Anderson Jr. said in a statement. “The efforts announced today are a direct result of the effective relationships we have with our partners in the private sector, international law enforcement, and within the US government.”
GameOverZeus would use sophisticated attacks to harvest confidential information once computers were infected. Where a banking site might normally ask for a username and password, the malware could add extra fields for social security number and credit card information, inserted seamlessly into the page’s layout.