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from the in-search-of-electronic-"brains!" dept.
Microsoft takes down millions of zombie bots:
Microsoft has said it was part of a team that dismantled an international network of zombie bots.
The network call Necurs infected over nine million computers and one of the world's largest botnets.
Necurs was responsible for multiple criminal scams including stealing personal information and sending fake pharmaceutical emails.
[...] Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice-president for customer security and trust, said in a blog post that the takedown of Necurs was the result of eight years of planning and co-ordination with partners in 35 countries.
He wrote that the steps taken will "ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyber-attacks."
[...] Necurs first appeared in 2012.
It is believed to have had a network of more than nine million zombie computers.
To grow this network Necurs used a domain generation algorithm that created random domain names the group turned into websites. It used these sites to send instructions to its army of infected computers.
Microsoft and its partners were able to crack Necurs' algorithm and predict what domain names it would be using in the months ahead and block them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:01PM
The problem is that most people that have their computers taken over are too computer illiterate to know how much hard drive their computers have. It's no different than those people that fall for those scammers that keep calling you.
"I'm from such and such and my company gave me this large check and I can't cash it for some reason due to technical difficulty. I need to write you this large check and you need to write me a smaller check back."
Really? Surprisingly people fall for this.