Representatives of the notorious hacking unit known as fancy brothers failed to defend against a lawsuit brought by a federal court in Virginia. Microsoft is launching a quiet war in the court against the threat group, which is considered to be associated with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency GRU. For now, the company has managed to control 70 domain names, but it is running after many more.
Background
The idea of a lawsuit filed in August 2016, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and American Trademark Law – is to use many federal laws – a way to seize it by the group Command-and-control domain names, which are run by various monitors including APT 28 and strontium. Many domains used by fancy brothers are Microsoft trademarks, such as microsoftinfo365.com and many other hundreds.
Struggle for default Judgment
In June 2017, Microsoft asked the judge to issue a default decision in his favor, because the people behind the fancy brothers did not know themselves, according to Daily Best, Microsoft and its lawyers through e-mail has made several attempts to serve the unknown “John Does”. According to Daily Best, those e-mails have been opened dozens of times and they were equipped with a tracking beacon. Microsoft’s lawyer has easily posted all government documents on the public website, in which the respondents have been invited to contact them via postal mail, e-mail or fax.
For many years, Microsoft has used similar American intellectual property laws as a way to disrupt various Boston and other malware. Microsoft is in a threat Microsoft’s intelligence manager Jason Norton has written that these domains can be enabled to keep Microsoft’s servers safe for all servers to communicate, from which strontium defenders communicate with infected computers has installed August 2016 Court filing.
Note
US Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan is expected to rule on the motion for default judgment within the coming months.