Necrus: Microsoft Has Just Taken Down a Huge Botnet Network

This updated guide examines Necrus: Microsoft Has Just Taken Down a Huge Botnet Network and organizes the essential facts, background, and practical takeaways in clear American English.

Specifically, this botnet called Necurs, behind the 'notorious' banking trojan, GameOver Zeus, along with dozens of other types of malware. Necurs is run by a Russian-based criminal organization, first discovered in 2012, and best known for its massive Locky ransomware campaigns that it 'snatched' in 2016 and 2017. It is also considered the largest spam botnet in the world, with nearly 3.8 million spam emails sent to over 40.6 million potential victims in just a period of nearly 2 months, causing great damage on global scale in recent years.

Microsoft said its Digital Crimes Unit team has been actively working with BitSight and many other security communities to analyze a technique used by the botnet itself in creating new domains via algorithms. The team then synthesized and made a prediction list of over 6 million domain names to be created in the next 25 months. These domain names were reported to registries worldwide and were eventually blocked to prevent future attacks.

The reason Microsoft and its partners were able to implement such powerful measures was with the consent of the US legislatures, which allowed them to seize the infrastructure being used by Necurs on. US territory. This legal step also plays a very important role in preventing criminals from operating botnets to register new domain names. In addition, Microsoft is also working with internet service providers to remove Necrus-related malware from customers' computers.