Necurs rootkit | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft today announced that it has successfully disrupted the botnet network of the Necurs malware, which has infected more than 9 million computers globally, and also hijacked the majority of its infrastructure. The latest botnet takedown was the result of a coordinated operation involving international police and private tech companies across 35 countries. The operation was conducted successfully after researchers successfully broke the domain generation algorithm (DGA) implemented by the Necurs malware, which helped it remain resilient for a long time. DGA is basically a technique to unpredictably generate new domain names at regular intervals, helping malware authors to continuously switch the location of C&C servers and maintain undisrupted digital communication with the infected machines. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months. Microsoft reported these domains to their respective r...

Rootkit named as "Necurs" infect 83,427 unique machines during the month of November 2012. It is a multi-purpose rootkits capable of posing a threat to both 32 and 64-bit Windows systems. Distributed via drive-by download on the websites that host the BlackHole exploit kit. Like other rootkits it is able to hide itself from detection and also capable of downloading additional malware from outside. Attackers can maintain remote access to a machine this way in order to monitor activity, send spam or install scareware. Rootkit also stop security applications from functioning and hence no detection. Microsoft list this as  Trojan:Win32/Necurs . Trojan:Win32/Necurs is a family of malware that work together to download additional malware and enable backdoor access and control of your computer. The malware can be installed on its own or alongside rogue security software, such as Rogue:Win32/Winwebsec. The malware downloads itself into the folder " %windi...