Dallas, Texas 12/06/2013 (Financialstrend) – On Thursday, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) said that it had been successful in disrupting the biggest network of PC’s that had been compromised. These involved around 2M different machines across the globe. The company has been fighting very aggressively against the online organized criminals who have been playing havoc by hacking the company’s systems and the company has been in efforts to disrupt their attempts for the last three years now.
The “click fraud”
The company filed a suit in Texas and also won a judge’s order that directed Internet service-providers to block traffic to 18 different Internet addresses that had been used to direct fraudulent activity to different infected machines. Law enforcement in a number of European countries have served warrants and seizing servers that are expected to hold more evidence about the people who head the ZeroAccess crime ring. This group is devoted to the “click fraud.”
The Botnets
Rings like this one use the networks of captive machines. These are called botnets, and are used in complicated schemes that compel them to click on ads without the knowledge of the owner of the computer. These schemes cheat the advertisers on search engines like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Bing and making them pay for these interactions that do not eventually lead to any sale. The company said that the botnet had been costing different advertisers on Google, Bing and Yahoo Inc almost $2.7 million on a monthly basis.
The solution
These coordinated efforts are the 8th time that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)) has fought aggressively against botnet. It is a rare instance of inflicting some serious damage to a computer that that is controlled with a P2P mechanism, where the infected machines instruct each other instead of being reliant on the central server that defenders are able to locate and disable. The ZeroAccess botnet had a weakness: The code in these infected machines told them to connect to one of these 18 numeric Internet-addresses
Microsoft opened a completely new Cybercrime Center in Redmond. The company is also making use of some new tools. There is an ongoing issue due to which some websites are spreading some tainted-versions of the IE browser. The new tools help in the pretrial seizure of the suspected counterfeit goods, like these websites. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is also working closely with national computer-security authorities in different countries and with Internet service-providers to notify computer-owners who have infected machines and is hoping to reach as many as they can before any new instructions are spread by the fraudsters.
The NSA story
In separate news, the company is moving to encrypt Internet-traffic based on the assumptions that the NSA has broken into the company’s internal global communications systems as it had done with Yahoo and Google said some people who are familiar with these plans.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s suspicions about the NSA intercepting traffic within its own private networks were increased in October. It had been reported then that intrusions like these have taken place with Yahoo and Google who use similar infrastructures. The company’s top executives are going to brainstorm exactly what initiative will be put into action.
