Microsoft goes up against massive extortion botnet
Cybercrime may not be as cool as my brain thinks it is every time it hears it, but it is a huge problem. Even in 2022 we have sophisticated phishing scams still successfully targeting fairly savvy PC users. Some of these digital attacks are huge, consisting of large groups of bad actors all over the world who then go on to infect even more machines. These form what's called Botnets, like the 1 million strong one Google recently faced down, and they do devastating damage to innocent people everywhere.
Microsoft has recently announced its taken legal and technical action against Zloader, another problematic Botnet ruining people's lives. Zloader is a notorious botnet that operates out of computers all over the world, even in hospitals and schools. It's known for installing malware and then extorting users, and even selling the ability to distribute ransomware to other criminals.
One such piece of ransomware Zloader has been known to distribute is Ryuk and it specifically targets hospitals and health care institutions. It then extorts payments from patients, which is just some truly evil stuff.
It almost sounds like the American healthcare system. It's almost like charging people for healthcare creates an uneven playing field of desperation and creates a population ripe for being targeted by scams. Almost.
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This is why it's such good news that Microsoft has obtained a court order from the United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia. This gives Microsoft control of 65 known domains Zloader was using to target, grow, and communicate. Zloader has a known domain generator which Microsoft also has court
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