Enlarge / You did a bad bad thing. (credit: Getty Images) Governments, vigilantes, and criminal hackers have a new way to disrupt botnets running the widely used attack software Cobalt Strike, courtesy of research published on Wednesday. Cobalt Strike is a legitimate security tool used by penetration testers to emulate malicious activity in a network. […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica) When hackers corral infected computers into a botnet, they take special care to ensure they don’t lose control of the server that sends commands and updates to the compromised devices. The precautions are designed to thwart security defenders who routinely dismantle botnets by taking over the command-and-control server […]