"Necurs Zombie Botnet Disrupted by Microsoft"

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that they have helped put into place steps to disrupt Necurs, which is one of the world's biggest and busiest botnets, from being used in the future. Researchers consider Necurs to be the most massive botnet ever. In 2017 it was estimated that Necurs consisted of more than 6,000,000 infected computers, and in the present, there are over 9,000,000 computers infected. Many of the infected computers are in India. However, almost every county in the world is affected by Necurs. Necurs' operators sometimes sell or rent access to their zombie computers to crooks. The botnets are used to distribute financially targeted malware and cryptomining. The botnets are also capable of launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. To show how much damage Necurs can cause, during a 58 day period, Microsoft observed, one Necurs-infected computer send out 3.8 million spam emails to over 40.6 million potential victims. Crooks behind Necurs will not be able to register new domains to execute attacks in the future because Microsoft analyzed how Necurs systematically generated new domains through the use of an algorithm. 

Naked Security reports: "Necurs Zombie Botnet Disrupted by Microsoft"