Large Pony botnet controller discovered

Every once in a while we get to peek into the lion’s den, this time we’ll be checking out a fairly large instance of the Pony botnet controller, containing a large amount of stolen credentials and other goodies.

Pony, for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of encountering it, is a bot controller much like any other: It has a control panel, user management, logging features, a database to manage all the data and, of course, statistics. It also seems to be doing these things right, as it appears to be popping up quite a bit lately.

This Pony, version 1.9 as they tend to be these days, was a particularly diligent one and within a few days hundreds of thousands of credentials were stolen from its victims.

Breakdown of stolen credentials per browser, e-mail client, and domain:

You may not think it by looking at these fairly professional statistics that wouldn’t put a dignified piece of software to shame, but Pony’s main business still remains theft: stolen credentials for websites, email accounts, FTP accounts, anything it can get its hands on- grabbed and reported back home.

A total of nearly 650,000 website credential stolen, with the top sites being:

• ~90,000 credentials for Facebook accounts
• ~25,000 credentials for Yahoo accounts
• ~20,000 credentials for Google accounts.

And many more with lower individual numbers, but still amounting to the remaining 515,000 accounts. 17,000 email accounts compromised, 7,000 FTP credentials were stolen.


Arseny Levine, Lead Security Researcher at Trustwave.