Sinkhole Sucks Brains From Wasteful Bitcoing-Mining Botnet

judgecorp writes: A sinkhole has taken a quarter of the bots out of the ZeroAcess botnet which was making money for its operators through click fraud and Bitcoin mining. This particular Bitcoin mining operation was only profitable through the use of stolen electricity — according to Symantec, which operated the sinkhole, ZeroAccess was using $561,000 of electricity a day on infected PCs, to generate about $2000 worth of Bitcoin/

Sinkholing?

[Open River]

Sinkholing, for those that are not aware of the concept, is a technique where an C&C domain or IP address of a malicious program is redirected to a dedicated server. The server has a software component that is listening for incoming connections from infected machines which are then logged for various purposes, whether it is to get media coverage by publishing screaming headlines (which we do not do), or for abuse handling purposes where the aim is to get the infected machines taken offline for cleaning