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FBI disrupts search hijack gang after $14 million fraud

The FBI has closed the net on an Estonian gang accused of being behind an extraordinary four-year multinational malware campaign said to have netted $14 million in proceeds after infecting hundreds of thousands of PCs and Macs.

That both Macs and PCs users were targeted by the gang is only the first unusual feature of a case that began as far back as 2006 with a piece of botnet-building malware called DNSChanger.

It’s not clear from the official reports which variant of this once-common malware the gang used but the underlying technique was to redirect infected users via rogue DNS servers which, it has now been revealed, were based in US datacentres rather than the gang’s Baltic homeland.

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