A few weeks ago, the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit identified and arrested a 19-year-old Dutch man who allegedly was operating a botnet known as Shadow. This botnet, unlike more recent examples, used IRC, meaning its traffic was easier to trace than the Web-based command and control traffic used today by most new botnets. Shadow would infect users via Windows Live Messenger or MSN Messenger.
What's unusual here is that the crime unit then asked Kaspersky Lab to provide the identified victims, people who had unknowingly allowed their computers to become compromised, with instructions on how to neutralize the malware on their systems. While antivirus companies and law enforcement work together all the time, rarely has law enforcement been concerned about cleaning up a victim's machine.
This week CNET's Robert Vamosi spoke by phone with Roel Schouwenberg, senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky, who happens to be based in the Netherlands, about the Shadow botnet.
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Robert Vamosi has appeared on CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, and various other media outlets as an expert on computer viruses, spyware, identity theft, phishing, and other criminal activities on the Internet.
