By Moristotle
Microsoft’s international take-down of the Necurs botnet, reported Tuesday in the NY Times, doesn’t seem to have solved the problem Moristotle & Co. have been having lately with spam comments trying to entice us to visit malicious websites.
We can say that because we had to dismiss three more spam comments this morning, as we have for several mornings in a row now. That is, Microsoft’s take-down did not prevent our receiving the comments. If anyone reading this should see such a spam comment before we get around to dismissing it, please beware and do not click on the comment’s link!
If the number of such comments dramatically increases, we may be forced to start “moderating” comments – that is, reviewing all comments (even yours) prior to allowing them to be published. And none of us wants that.
The NY Times article is titled “A Botnet Is Taken Down in an Operation by Microsoft, Not the Government,” by David E. Sanger. [A botnet is a network of web robots, software applications that run automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet, in this case for malicious purposes.]
The Times article is an astounding read – Microsoft employees had been tracking a criminal group for years who were “infecting millions of computers around the world, hijacking them to send spam emails intended to defraud unsuspecting victims.”
Finally, for Tuesday’s action, Microsoft “organized 35 nations...to take down one of the world’s largest botnets..., believed to be based in Russia....The group also mounted stock market scams and spread ransomware, which locks up a computer until the owner pays a fee.” [read more]
| Copyright © 2020 by Moristotle |
A paragraph from the NY Times article of possibly special interest – to those, anyway, willing to entertain the possibility that Trump really has been compromised by Russia, given his apparent friendship and respect for Putin[*]:
ReplyDelete“Necurs is not believed to be a state-sponsored Russian group. But intelligence officials say it is tolerated by the Russian state, and on regular occasions the Kremlin’s intelligence services use private actors to pursue their goals. The Internet Research Agency, which mounted the social media disinformation campaign on Facebook and other platforms during the 2016 American president election, was a private group, though founded by a close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” [emphasis mine]
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* Putin is pronounced, perhaps sardonically, by David Carnwall, aka John Le Carré, as “Pooh-teen” in his recorded reading of his latest novel, Agent Running in the Field.
The article concludes with reference to America’s 2020 elections:
Delete“‘The cybercriminals are incredibly agile,’ said Tom Burt, the executive who leads Microsoft’s security and trust operations, ‘and they come back more sophisticated, more complex. It is an ultimate cat-and-mouse game.’
“The next battlefield, he said, would be the 2020 presidential election.
“‘We expect the volume and sophistication of the adversary attacks to accelerate as we get closer to Election Day,’ he said.
“‘They will play many of the same moves they used in 2016,’ Mr. Burt said. ‘But they will use others as well,’ including the possibility of ransomware that locks up local voter registration systems, a major fear of election officials across the United States.
“‘The trick this time is to be ready, agile and aware that we have to be one step ahead,’ he said.”