Cyber Crime

Necurs botnet is behind seasonal campaigns of Valentine’s Day-themed spam

Necurs botnet made headline again, the experts at IBM X-Force research team observed a spike in seasonal campaigns of Valentine’s Day-themed spam emails.

Necurs botnet made headline again, the experts at IBM X-Force research team observed a spike in the activity of the infamous botnet.

Necurs was not active for a long period at the beginning of 2017 and resumed it activity in April 2017. The Necurs botnet was used in the past months to push many other malware, including LockyJaffGlobeImposterDridex , Scarab and the Trickbot.

Scammers are mow using the Necurs botnet to send out an amazing number of messages offering companionship waiting for Valentine’s day.

Crooks are using the spam messages to trick victims into sharing personal photos that are used later by cybercriminals to blackmail the victims.

According to the IBM X-Force team, the campaign started in mid-January, it leverages the overall Necurs botnet that is composed of 6 million bots.

“The current campaign from Necurs reached over 230 million spam messages within a matter of two weeks as the botnet spewed tens of millions of messages in two major bouts. The first surge started on Jan. 16 and ran through Jan. 18; the second started on Jan. 27 and died down on Feb. 3.” reads the analysis published by X-Force researchers.

The expert spotted two current campaigns that sent out a total 230 million spam messages in 14 days-period.

 

The first campaign reached a peak between Jan. 16 and Jan. 18 and the second one began on Jan. 27 and lasted through Feb. 3. Researchers observed an average 30 million spam messages were sent each day.

“Looking at the messages being sent out in excess of 30 million emails a day, the current campaign delivers short email blurbs from supposed Russian women living in the U.S. While typical spam email is notorious for bad spelling and grammar, these samples are rather well-worded.” continues the analysis.”

The experts determined that the spam messages are being sent from about 950,000 unique IP addresses, Most of IP are hosted in Vietnam and India while the top sender IP address is hosted via a Pakistani-based ISP.

“Together, Vietnam and India hosted 55 percent of the IPs from which the spam originated. It’s worth noting that spammers constantly shuffle the resources they leverage and the originating IPs logged in one campaign are not likely to be used in the next one. This is how fraudsters avoid blacklists and blocking.” added the researchers.

After the takedowns of the Andromeda and Avalanche botnets, Necurs remains the largest spam distributor in the cybercrime ecosystem. Crooks will continue to leverage the Necurs botnet for their spam campaigns, for this reason, the most effective countermeasure is to increase employee awareness on such kind of threats.

[adrotate banner=”9″] [adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Necurs botnet, Valentine’s Day)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

American fast-fashion firm Hot Topic hit by credential stuffing attacks

Hot Topic suffered credential stuffing attacks that exposed customers' personal information and partial payment data.…

3 hours ago

Cisco addressed high-severity flaws in IOS and IOS XE software

Cisco addressed multiple vulnerabilities in IOS and IOS XE software that can be exploited to…

17 hours ago

Google: China dominates government exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant reported a surge in the number of actively…

23 hours ago

Google addressed 2 Chrome zero-days demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2024

Google addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser that have been demonstrated during…

1 day ago

INC Ransom stole 3TB of data from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland

The INC Ransom extortion group hacked the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland and is threatening…

2 days ago

CISA adds Microsoft SharePoint bug disclosed at Pwn2Own to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability disclosed at the…

2 days ago

This website uses cookies.