Microsoft has made the decision to take action against a botnet known as “Trickbot”. According to the company, this was done in order to help protect the integrity of the 2020 United States elections. The Trickbot malware has been connected to misinformation in regards to political discourse, financial infrastructure attacks, DDoS attacks, attacks on healthcare facilities, and many others. On October 6th, 2020, Microsoft obtained a court order to block IP addresses associated with key network infrastructure known to be used by the Trickbot network. This is after almost four years of investigative work by Microsoft and analysis of around 61,000 samples of Trickbot malware.
Created by Russian hackers around 2016, Trickbot is known as a “modular” malware in that it is easily malleable depending on the intended attack. Cyber criminals can adjust targets and tactics of the botnet in order to spread to computers and networking equipment such as routers. It is this fact that has some cyber security experts saying that Microsoft’s actions will do little to disrupt Trickbot. This is due to the modular and easily customizable code used by the botnet. This also tends to make disrupting an operation such as Trickbot due to the decentralized nature of the attacks.
The US government has stated that malware is the number one threat to the elections.
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