How to steal a botnet and what can happen when you do

Botnets, which are networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, which is a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims. In this talk, I report on our efforts to take control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected.