Private and public sectors come together for botnet removal effort
TrickBot, a malware network that is often described as one of the world’s largest with at least a million PCs, is once again in the news. Earlier this month, the botnet was the focus of two independent efforts to take it down: from Microsoft and from the US Cyber Command.
Both of these efforts were aimed at a preemptive strike in advance of the November election and weren’t completely successful: TrickBot’s operators were able to reclaim access to their computers within half a day after Cyber Command sent out phony updates to the component PCs on the network that took them offline. But what is newsworthy is how the two organizations worked to try to stop the botnet’s activities.
While the botnet hasn’t been used against any election computing network, DoD was concerned that it could be so deployed because its origins point to being Russian state-sponsored. The Cyber Command has been focused lately on engaging directly with malware groups, as mentioned in this Foreign Affairs post from this past summer co-authored by General Paul Nakasone, the Director of the NSA. “We learned that we cannot afford to wait for cyber attacks to affect our military networks. We learned that defending our military networks requires executing operations o ..
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