While national and worldwide agencies wage a war against online crime through the criminal courts, Microsoft is finding success using civil suits to help crack down on botnets, arguably the most dangerous form of cybercrime due to the massive scope of their reach. Through botnets, which are groupings of computers that attempt to harvest personal and bank information from millions of computers connected to the internet, cybercriminals have a nearly automated way of getting passwords and hacking into financial accounts. They are often hard to trace and even harder to take down, but Microsoft’s…

Everyone has heard of hackers, viruses, and spam. What fewer people have heard of or understand are botnets despite statistics that show they’re trending to be the choice of current cybercriminals. By using “Command-and-Control” servers, hackers are able to remotely take over computers to execute their nefarious activities. Connecting through C&C servers allows a “bot herder” is able to send out spam emails, spread viruses, distribute malicious software, and steal identities. Nearly 90% of all email spam is sent through botnets – and that’s not their biggest threat. This infographic…