Good Guys Bring Down the Mega-D Botnet

For two years as a researcher with security company FireEye, Atif Mushtaq worked to keep Mega-D bot malware from infecting clients’ networks. In the process, he learned how its controllers operated it. Last June, he began publishing his findings online. In November, he suddenly switched from defence to offence. And Mega-D — a powerful, resilient botnet that had forced 250,000 PCs to do its bidding — went down