Mariposa botnet

The Mariposa botnet, discovered December 2008, is a botnet mainly involved in cyberscamming and denial-of-service attacks. Before the botnet itself was dismantled on 23 December 2009, it consisted of up to 12 million unique IP addresses or up to 1 million individual zombie computers infected with the 'Butterfly (mariposa in Spanish) Bot', making it one of the largest known botnets.The botnet was originally created by the DDP Team (Spanish: Días de Pesadilla Team, English: Nightmare Days Team), using a malware program called 'Butterfly bot', which was also sold to various individuals and organisations. The goal of this malware program was to install itself on an uninfected PC, monitoring activity for passwords, bank credentials and credit cards. After that the malware would attempt to self-propagate to other connectible systems using various supported methods, such as MSN, P2P and USB.