Giant Dutch Botnet Busted, Forced to Commit Ritualistic Suicide

When the Dutch High Tech Crime unit raided the 150,000-machine strong Shadow botnet, they didn’t simply bust its 19- and 16-year-old basement-dwelling operators. Oh no. Instead of simply decapitating it from the top, the police enlisted the help of Kaspersky Labs to actually take full control, driving the cold dagger of the law even deeper into Shadow’s own soulless guts.

In the suicide operation, the botnet’s connections were used by Kaspersky to notify all 150,000 of the infected machines (which is uncommon in itself–most would prefer to not know their computers have been doing naughty things in the dark). Instead of popping up a window full of l33t retardedness, Shadow provided instructions on how to kill itself, one node at a time, to the unsuspecting users. You can check out the details of the fix here. [Kaspersky via Ars Technica]