14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, we learned that police in Germany arrested two individuals who used a modified version of an existing malware to create a botnet which they’d leveraged to mine over €700,000 ($954,000) in Bitcoins.
Police say two people have been detained, and a third one has been questioned.
Authorities have not provided any details regarding the malware or the cybercriminals, but many security experts are confident that one of the suspects is the author of the notorious Skynet malware, which is actually based on the ZeuS banking Trojan.
MalwareTech highlights the fact that Skynet’s author mentioned working on a new version of the malware just one day before his arrest. However, after German police announced the arrests, he hasn’t posted any updates.
A message has been published on his Twitter account though. It reads, “You have the wrong guy. Use this tweet as evidence to do the right thing and release him.”
However, experts believe that this is either an automated tweet, or the cybercriminal had someone post it on his behalf in case he got arrested.
Skynet was first spotted by GData researchers in the summer of 2012. In December 2012, experts from Rapid 7 also analyzed the threat.
Skynet is capable of performing various tasks, including launching DDOS attacks, mining Bitcoin and stealing banking information.
Its author became famous after doing an AMA on Reddit. Just before the arrests were announced, the man, who uses the Twitter handle @skynetbnet, revealed that he was working on a new Skynet malware that used code from the leaked Carberp bootkit.
The cybercriminal noted that the new threat would be capable of starting before antiviruses.