A team of cyber police from France named 'cyber gendarmes' successfully eliminated a virus that has infected more than 850 thousand computers worldwide.
The infected computer network - often referred to as a botnet - is controlled from France, and its makers are thought to have made millions of euros in profits from the botnet network.
Initially, the French police received a report from the anti-virus company Avast, which reported that there was a private server in France that was the control center for a virus called Retadup.
This retadup infects hundreds of thousands of Windows-based computers in more than 100 countries, mainly in parts of the American continent, such as South America and Central, as quoted by the BBC on Friday (8/30/2019). The virus is spread through emails offering money or even erotic photos. There is also a spread through the flash disk.
Retadup makers can control the victim's PC without the owner knowing it. There is much he can do, such as mining Monero's crypto currency, asking for ransom via ransomware, and even stealing data from a number of hospitals in Israel. The hacker behind the botnet network is thought to have generated millions of euros since the virus first spread, namely in 2016, until now.
"We managed to find the location of the central server, the 'control tower' for the botnet network or infected computers," said Chief C3N Jean-Dominique Nollet.
Then, according to Nollet, it made a replica of the server which made the virus no longer active on infected computers. French Police also got help from the FBI to block and divert the virus data traffic to the replica server.
"Many do not realize it, but 850 thousand infected computers are a very large force, enough to turn off all civilian-owned sites on the planet," he concluded.