MobiTechInfo
As Valentine’s Day approaches, fraudulent spam related to web pages and applications to find a partner increases. It has been detected by IBM Internet Security Systems, one of the largest computer and cybersecurity companies in the world, which attributes this increase to the Necurs botnet, the largest active distributor in the service of criminals.
Necurs is capable of distributing large amounts of spam: in this spam campaign, it has sent more than 230 million unwanted emails, in the context of two major attacks. It has done it from almost one million different IP addresses to an average of 30 million daily emails.
In a press release, IBM Think has explained that these emails contain false messages from Russian women living in the United States. In the text mention that the recipient has a profile on Facebook or the Russian dating site Badoo and ask to get in touch with another email address.
The objective of this type of campaign is to defraud the victims and for these several strategies are followed, such as asking for money to visit them, getting compromising photos in order to extort them or infect their computers with malware.
One fact that has surprised the experts of IBM is that the emails are well written, without spelling or grammar. Normally spam messages are short and unattractive, but scammers play with the fact that by mass distribution, although the percentage of users who bite the bait is low, they are still affected in absolute numbers.
Cybercriminals take advantage of fads to catch more victims with their massive spam campaigns. For example, at the beginning of the year they focus on tax-related messages and as we get closer to Valentine’s Day there is more and more spam that has to do with dating websites.
Necurs uses millions of bots to run fraudulent spam campaigns and infect computers with malware
Necurs netbot controls millions of bots that it uses to execute massive fraudulent spam campaigns. Necurs exploits its distribution power to infect millions of machines with malware and ransomware, in addition to carrying out scams.
The analysts of the security department X-Force of IBM have denounced another scam of the same netbot . It is a spam program to convince the recipients of the email to buy certain actions.
The value of the shares increases with the purchases of the victims. The same scammers take advantage of this moment to sell their part at a high price. Then the stock price falls and the fraud victims lose their money.
