If you’ve ever watched a horror movie, you know the trope where the hero seemingly kills the monster, but as soon as he turns his back to walk away the monster regains consciousness and attacks again with renewed vigor. According to the latest report from F-Secure, that’s the sort of scenario we might be looking at with the Gameover Zeus botnet.

Gameover Zeus, or GOZ, is a massive botnet that was effectively knocked out of commission through a concerted multinational effort dubbed “Operation Tovar” involving the U.S. Department of Justice, law enforcement, foreign government agencies, and private security companies. The botnet was the driving force behind CryptoLocker ransomware, which encrypts all the data on the compromised system and demands a ransom payment from the user to purchase the decryption key.

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