Zeus Botnets Are Taken Down by Unique Team

BALTIMORE — The NACHA session opened with dramatic video. Microsoft lawyers accompanied by U.S. marshals swooped into a characterless office building in Scranton, Pa., where they proceeded to seize computers that had been used to host giant botnet networks of zombie computers that–unbeknownst to their owners–were under the control of the so-called Zeus virus.

This was reality. A network that had controlled around 3.5 million computers–spitting out literally hundreds of millions of phishing and spam emails daily–had been dealt a crippling blow by an effort that brought together Microsoft, NACHA, the Financial Services-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and the U.S. government.