Microsoft Disrupts Nitol Botnet

hypnosec writes "Having procured permission from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit managed to disrupt more than 500 different strains of malware in a bid to slow down the threats posed by the Nitol botnet. Microsoft, through an operation codenamed b70 (PDF), discovered Chinese retailers were involved in selling computers with a pirated version of Windows loaded with malware. Microsoft believes the malware could have entered the supply chain at any point, for the simple reason that a computer travels among companies that transport and resell the computer. The Windows 8 maker carried out a study focused on the Nitol botnet, through which it found nearly 20 percent of all the PCs that were purchased through insecure Chinese supply chains were infected with malware."

Comments

Can you imagine...

[gavron]

If only back in 1998 when Microsoft knew that Windows 95 was open to all malware,
if they'd modified their thinking.

Instead of "let's make it so Win3.1 software can run on all our machines" and "Let's
make it so Win95 can run on all our machines" and propagating that so EVEN THE
Win2K (NT) kernel was vulnerable... ...they could have used a real security model, locked down the system, and there
would be no malware, no virus, no antivirus, no UEFI, no nothing today.

If there is one company that MADE A CONSCIOUS DECISION to let malware live
so that old software [you know, like your restaurant's point-of-sale system] run on
W95,W98, WME, W2K, Vista, 8, etc., and because of that decision the world is
overrun with malware, malware writers, mafias of malware writers, bitcoin thieves,
credit card thieves, wire-transfer thieves... that one company COULD HAVE made
a difference.

But they chose not to.

So today they "disrupted" (nonsense word) a botnet? That's good. Even if they
ELIMINATED the ENTIRE botnet, it's just one of many.

Useless. Microsoft.

E