Can’t keep this bad boy down: ZeroAccess botnet back in business

A peer-to-peer botnet called ZeroAccess came out of a six-month hibernation this month after having survived two takedown attempts by law enforcement and security researchers.

At its peak in 2013, ZeroAccess, also known as Sirefef, consisted of more than 1.9 million infected computers that were primarily used for click fraud and Bitcoin mining.

That was until security researchers from Symantec found a flaw in the botnet’s resilient peer-to-peer architecture. This architecture allowed the bots to exchange files, instructions and information with each other without the need for central command-and-control servers, which are the Achilles’ heel of most botnets.

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