Symantec uses vulnerability to take out part of the ZeroAccess botnet

Symantec has announced that they’ve successfully taken down a significant part of the ZeroAccess botnet, by exploiting a weakness discovered in its code.

The ZeroAccess botnet has existed in one form or another since 2010, last September, security vendor Sophos reported that the executable for ZeroAccess had been downloaded approximately 9 million times, and Kindsight, a network-based security and analytics vendor, reported that 2.2 million home networks were infected by the botnet as of Q3 2012.