Microsoft and a group of partners have taken down a Trickbot botnet, used to distribute COVID-19 spam and phishing scams and to provide malware as a service, the company recently announced.

The Trickbot botnet is also used to distribute ransomware, a growing threat to election-related organizations. Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, wrote in a blog post: “Adversaries can use ransomware to infect a computer system used to maintain voter rolls or report on election-night results, seizing those systems at a prescribed hour optimized to sow chaos and distrust.”