Experts Believe that German Police Arrested Author of Skynet Botnet

Softpedia.com reported on 9th December 2013 stating that German Police arrested two individuals in the first week of December 2013 but authorities did not release any details about the malware or the cybercriminals and so many experts are confident that one of the suspects is the author of the notorious Skynet malware.

Though it's still not affirmed that the duo arrested are the real authors of the botnet but the author of the notorious botnet hasn't tweeted ever since this arrest and various sources who had close work relations with the Skynet author have confirmed that he was apprehended. The entire story synchronizes with the operations of the Skynet author like trading of banking details, bitcoin mining, employing tailored malware and operating a porn website.

However, thehackernews.com reported on 9th December, 2013 quoting a message of 6th December, 2013 on his Twitter account as "You have the wrong guy. Use this tweet as evidence and do the right thing and release him."

But many experts believe this as an automated tweet or cybercriminals had someone post it on his behalf in case of his arrest.

A day before the supposed arrest, Skynet author seemed to work on its upgrading to use a customized variant of the leaked Carberp bootkit permitting the malware to begin before anti-viruses.

Skynet was initially identified in December 2012 by security vendor G Data and believed to be a variant of infamous Zeus Trojan. The controlling of the botnet was done from an IRC (Internet relay chat) server concealed at the back of Tor network so as to avoid sink-holing.

Thehackernews.com published a report on 9th December, 2013 stating that Thomas Siebert, Security researcher of G DATA, confirmed the arrest of authors of Skynet Botnet by German Police on 3rd December, 2013 just after a day of the arrests.

The author of Skynet became famous after posting a blog on Reddit which led him to describe how they successfully compromised more than 15,000 systems and once infected, the malware downloaded Bitcoin miners exploiting computational resources of the system of the victim and used them in the mining process.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/18/2013