Microsoft sues creators of mass-spamming bots for trademark infringement
Microsoft is suing unnamed actors for using and creating the “Necurs botnet,” a large network of computers deliberately infecting millions of devices and then sending spam emails, which the software giant claims damages its reputation.
In a filing, presented on Thursday, March 5, at the US District Court of Eastern District of New York, Microsoft claimed the Necurs botnet is an “extremely scaled infrastructure, capable of sending a massive volume of spam, and is one of the largest bodies of infrastructure in the spam email threat ecosystem”.
To date, the filing claimed, Necurs has infected at least nine million victim computers, and the defendants have used Necurs to send spam email, install malicious software, steal financial account information, funds and personal information from millions of individuals.
“Once a computing device is infected, the Windows operating system ceases to operate normally and is transformed into tools of deception and theft. But Windows still bears Microsoft’s trademarks. This is obviously meant to and does mislead Microsoft’s customers, and it causes extreme damage to Microsoft’s brands and trademarks,” said the filing.
“Customers who experience degraded performance of Microsoft’s product may attribute such poor performance to Microsoft, causing extreme damage to Microsoft’s brands and trademarks and goodwill,” said the filing, and even customers who “eventually come to learn their computing devices are infected with malware may incorrectly attribute the infection to vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s products, because many customers are unaware that they have fallen prey to defendants’ attacks”.
Necurs severely damages the computing devices it infects, making low-level changes to the operating system and, with respect to Windows 7 (a relatively old version of the operating system), degrades the primary security defence of most computing devices, namely the antivirus software, by blocking the computing device from getting anti-virus software updates, said the filing.
Microsoft said it will amend the complaint to allege the ‘John Doe’ defendants’ true names if and when ascertained, it said.
Microsoft is seeking, among other things, a declaration that the defendants’ “conduct has been willful and that defendants have acted with fraud, malice, and oppression; a permanent injunction giving Microsoft”, control over the domains used by defendants “to cause injury and enjoining defendants from using such instrumentalities”; and damages adequate to compensate Microsoft.
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