India ranks third among ZeroAccess Botnet Infections, says Symantec

According to a research by Symantec, it has been identified that the company has taken the first step in combating the ZeroAccess botnet by sinkholing more than half a million bots, making a serious dent to the number of bots under the attacker’s control. ZeroAccess is a sophisticated and resilient botnet, which has been active since 2011 and is one of the largest known botnets in existence  with upwards of 1.9 million infected computers on a given day as observed in August 2013.  While 35 per cent of the infections were observed in the US, India had the third highest infection rate globally, just behind US and Japan. Nearly six per cent of ZeroAccess infections were observed in India.
 
Symantec is actively working with ISPs and CERTs worldwide to share information and help get ZeroAccess bot-infected computers cleaned up.  Symantec continues to devote the resources of security experts  as well as the largest, most sophisticated global intelligence network in the world  to investigate security threats in order to keep customers  from individual consumers to global corporations  informed and protected.
 
The ZeroAccess botnet is one of the largest known botnets in existence today with a population upwards of 1.9 million computers, on any given day, as observed by Symantec in August 2013. A key feature of the ZeroAccess botnet is its use of a peer-to-peer (P2P) command-and-control (C&C) communications architecture, which gives the botnet a high degree of availability and redundancy.

ZeroAccess also leverages click-fraud and Bitcoin mining to carry out two revenue-generating activities  potentially earning tens of millions of US dollars per year in the process.