Security News
A New York State court issued an order this week giving Microsoft control of the U.S.-based infrastructure used by the notorious Necurs botnet in an effort to stop the world's most prolific and globally dispersed spam and malware infrastructure. The move came after Microsoft and partners across 35 countries cracked Necur's domain generation algorithm, which is what generates random domain names to allow the botnet to distribute malware and infect victim computers around the world.
Microsoft says it managed to disrupt the Necurs botnet by taking control of the U.S.-based infrastructure that it has been using to conduct its malicious activities. Necurs is a peer-to-peer hybrid botnet that uses a Domain Generation Algorithm to ensure bots could always connect to a command and control server.
Microsoft today announced that it has successfully disrupted the botnet network of the Necurs malware, which has infected more than 9 million computers globally, and also hijacked the majority of its infrastructure. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months. Microsoft reported these domains to their respective registries in countries around the world so the websites can be blocked and thus prevented from becoming part of the Necurs infrastructure," Microsoft said.
Microsoft today announced that it has successfully disrupted the botnet network of the Necurs malware, which has infected more than 9 million computers globally, and also hijacked the majority of its infrastructure. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months. Microsoft reported these domains to their respective registries in countries around the world so the websites can be blocked and thus prevented from becoming part of the Necurs infrastructure," Microsoft said.
Though the fourth quarter of 2019 saw a decrease in malicious activity, threats such as the Emotet malware continued to thrive, says Nuspire. Organizations received a type of holiday gift during the fourth quarter of 2019 as the volume of malware and other security threats declined.
A mid-January spam campaign by criminals behind the popular Necurs botnet shows a dramatic drop in skill and savvy by perpetrators. "Things are changing and with major banking Trojan botnets moving away from Necurs and to distribution through inter-gang collaborations, Necurs has been left behind to distribute amateur spam campaigns in high volumes," IBM X-Force researchers said in a Monday post.
A new variant of the Muhstik botnet has appeared, this time with scanner technology that for the first time can brute-force web authentication to attack routers using Tomato open-source firmware, researchers have found. "The new Muhstik variant scans Tomato routers on TCP port 8080 and bypasses the admin web authentication by default credentials bruteforcing," researchers wrote in their report.
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