It seems like the good guys don’t win very often but once in a while, they do. Recently, Microsoft, in conjunction with partners from 35 different countries, interrupted one of the world’s largest botnets, called Necurs.

The first question on your mind might be: what is a botnet? Simply put, it’s a network of computers which have been compromised by viruses or malware or hacking and turned into robots performing malicious activities. This can be anything from spamming emails, to pushing out more malware which will infect other computers. Botnets can also be used to perform DDos attacks. DDos stands for Distributed Denial of Service. It can be used to bring a website to a halt and block legitimate users from reaching the site. Think of it this way: ten people attempt to log onto our website https://www.4kcc.com and there would be no problem. However, if a botnet was used to send 100,000 requests for our website, the server would freeze up or, worse yet, crash.

The Necurs botnet was made up of more than nine million infected computers, globally. Stop and read that number again – 9 Million! I never want your computing device to become part of a botnet. That’s the reason I’m always preaching about keeping your devices up-to-date, having good anti-virus software, not visiting questionable sites, not clicking on links or attachments in email that you aren’t 100% sure are safe, and finally, not falling for phone calls or pop-up windows from “Microsoft,” “Windows,” “Apple” or “Google,” etc.

If you’d like to read the full article from Microsoft regarding what happened with the Necurs botnet, just click the button below.