Microsoft orchestrates coordinated takedown of Necurs botnet

#News(Security) [ via IoTGroup ]

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Microsoft orchestrates coordinated takedown of Necurs botnet
Coordinated effort across 35 countries
One of the largest spam botnets ever created

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Microsoft announced today a coordinated takedown of Necurs, one of the largest spam and malware botnets known to date, believed to have infected more than nine million computers worldwide.
The takedown effort came after Microsoft and industry partners broke the Necurs DGA — the botnet’s domain generation algorithm, the component that generates random domain names.
Necurs authors register DGA-generated domains weeks or months in advance and host the botnet’s command-and-control (C&C) servers, where bots (infected computers) connect to receive new commands.
Breaking the DGA allowed Microsoft and its industry partners to create a comprehensive list of future Necurs C&C server domains that they can now block and prevent the Necurs team from registering.
Furthermore, Microsoft’s legal team also intervened and obtained a court order last week, on March 5, granting Microsoft control over existing Necurs domains that were being hosted in the US.
The OS maker said it worked with cybersecurity firms, internet service providers, domain registries, government CERTs, and law enforcement across 35 countries to coordinate the Necurs takedown, making this one of the biggest coordinated takedowns that have ever taken place.
After Microsoft has taken control of existing Necurs infrastructure, the company and its industry partners have been able to sinkhole the botnet and receive information about all the bots located across the world.
As a final step part of this effort, Microsoft says it’s now working with ISPs and CERT teams to notify users who have been infected so that they can remove the malware from their computers.
Historically, the Necurs botnet first appeared in 2012 and became one of the largest spam botnets known to date.
The botnet is the collection of all computers that have been infected by a malware module named Necurs.
The Necurs spam module runs on a user’s computers and uses its resources to send out massive amounts of spam email on a daily basis

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