International police bring down Beebone botnet

Dutch police, working alongside Europol and the FBI, have taken down the 'Beebone' botnet suspected of infecting as many as 30,000 devices a month worldwide.

Symantec first detected the malware strain - which is also known as Changeup or AAEH - in 2009.

Victim's computers are infected by the polymorphic downloader which provides a backdoor to install various forms of malware including Zeus, Cryptolocker, ZeroAccess and Cutwail on the device.

Beebone could morph every few hours to rapidly infect networks and evade detection, with over five million unique samples recorded.

This week the US FBI announced it had successfully siezed around 100 domain names being used by Beebone with a court authorisation, and is in the process of redirecting infected machines to a 'sinkhole' server being operated by Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, who will then make contact with victims who need assistance.

The operation was led by Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit in a joint effort with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, the US FBI and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce.

The FBI is continuing to investigate home many computers have been infected, although security company Symantec says it detected approximately 30,000 infections per month in 2015, while Europol has placed its estimate closer to 12,000 infections in total.