Software giant Microsoft has decided to work with the folks over at the FBI, having announced today that this particular alliance has seen them disrupt Citadel. Citadel is not a place, and neither is it a team of hackers, but rather, Citadel stands for the name of over 1,000 botnets which were utilized to steal people’s banking information and identities.
In fact, Citadel has been identified by the authorities to be responsible for total losses of over half a billion dollars worldwide, and the number of folks affected by Citadel’s ‘antics’ numbered more than 5 million people, where the majority of them so happen to reside in the U.S., Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and Australia. In total, however, Microsoft mentioned that they managed to discover the evidence of Citadel in over 90 countries. Just what is Citadel, you ask? It is a malware that would place key-logging software onto a user’s hard drive upon installation, where it will keep track of all that you type.
It is nice to hear that a North Carolina district court actually empowered Microsoft with the relevant authority to shut down communication between 1,462 Citadel botnets and the millions of computers that happen to be under their control.