On Tuesday, just a day after law enforcement announced an international effort to disrupt the Gameover Zeus botnet, CERT Polksa released early indicators that malicious traffic linked to the trojan had dropped significantly.
On Twitter, the computer emergency response team (CERT) shared a chart mapping the malicious traffic coming from infected botnet computers. Starting last Friday, the chart showed the number of sent packets per minute dove well below 500, as opposed to the earlier 1,000 to 2,000 range. By Saturday, it appeared that the incoming packets remained in the low hundreds or close to zero.
Disruption of the Gameover botnet coincided with federal prosecutors announcing criminal charges against the suspected botnet administrator, Evgeniy Bogachev, who remains at large. Prosecutors estimated that the botnet consisted of a network of 500,000 to one million infected computers running the Windows platform.
