‘Funky’ Mumba botnet hits 55,000 systems

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A botnet has infected 55,000 computers and illicitly acquired over 60GB of personal data along the way, a security company has warned.

The Mumba botnet has stolen information including details from social networking sites, banking account data and email communications, according to AVG Technologies.

US users have been hardest hit, with 33 per cent of all Mumba-infected PCs situated in the country, compared to six per cent in the UK.

“The Mumba botnet, so called because of some funky attributes our researchers found on the server, was created by one of the most sophisticated groups of cyber criminals on the internet known as the Avalanche Group,” explained Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG.

“This group has perfected a mass-production system for deploying phishing sites and data stealing malware,” he added in a blog post.

Mumba uses the most up-to-date version of the famous Zeus piece of malware. Just last month, Zeus popped up in an attack that cloned the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode protection features to trick users into entering personal data.

“The unique infrastructure of the Mumba botnet means that going after the servers hosting the stolen data is now much more difficult than before,” added Yuval Ben-Itzhak, senior vice president at AVG.

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