Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet

Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by Ericson2314 on Monday October 12, 2020 @11:28AM (#24755395)

A few things to counter here:

1. Considering the sloppy bullshit that is the root cause of 95%+ security vulnerabilities today, I think talking about "0 security" bugs is a distorting strawman.

2. No one said no recalls. The issue here is Microsoft is going after the exploiter rather than the bug, taking the law into their own hands over dubious pretenses.

  That's somewhere in between taking the drivers licenses of Corvair owners and recalling the Corvairs themselves. (We could make a better anology if a black hat actor triggered the car defect.)

3. This could easily be precedent for scenario:

  1. Security researcher finds bug and discloses it
  2. Big crop declines to pay up / doesn't fix in timely manner, etc.
  3. Security researcher goes public
  4. Malware is made with exploit
  5. Big corp goes vigilante on malware like this *and* sues security researcher, using this trademark justification in *both* cases.

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Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by CrazyStat on Monday October 12, 2020 @03:04PM (#24758131)

In what sense is Microsoft "taking the law into their own hands"? They filed a lawsuit and convinced the judge to agree with their legal theory. That's how the legal system works.

There is no vigilantism here.

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Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by withinboredom on Monday October 12, 2020 @01:09PM (#24756667)

They mention in the article how it spreads via emails not via exploits (in which it would be called a worm, not malware).

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Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by saghm on Monday October 12, 2020 @01:20PM (#24756799)

Isn't a worm just a type of malware? Wikipedia describes malware as "any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network".

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Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by Talanes on Monday October 12, 2020 @03:44PM (#24758622)

Seconded, I've always understood malware to be a broad categorization and not a specific type of attack.

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Re:Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet by withinboredom on Monday October 12, 2020 @04:46PM (#24759259)

I'd always assumed that malware was malicious software disguised as something else; the layman term for trojan. TIL that it's much more generic than that.

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