Researchers from the University of California in Santa Barbara have managed to “capture” the notorious Tropig botnet.

 

The botnet “hijacking” was part of an ongoing attempt to understand the working methods and tactics of hackers. Web criminals are using such botnet and other viruses to take control over computers and steal the owner’s information.

 

One of the signs that your computer has been infected is if you are suffering from what is known as a slow computer. In such a case users are advised to request a computer repair.

The UCSB group of researchers examined the activity of the botnet for 10 days and discovered that the botnet developers had collected some 70 GB worth of data from some 180,000 infected computers in this short period. They had seized about 298,000 unique credentials from more than 52,000 zombie PCs.

The researchers added that information collected by the Tropig included bank information, credit card details, user passwords, email account data and more.

 

“The victims of botnets are users with poorly maintained machines that choose easily guessable passwords to protect access to sensitive sites,” the researchers wrote. “This is evidence that the malware problem is fundamentally a cultural problem.”