Articles Tagged: AmateurMatch

In the Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet

For many months I’ve been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that seems to be mainly used for advertising adult online dating sites. Having hit a wall surface within my research, I made a decision it may be good to create what I’ve unearthed up to now to see if this dovetails with just about any research available to you.

In belated October 2016, a source that is anonymous with KrebsOnSecurity.com a listing of almost 100 URLs that — when packed as a Firefox web browser — each exhibited exactly just just exactly what looked like a crude but otherwise effective text-based panel built to report in real-time exactly how many “bots” were reporting set for responsibility.

Here’s a couple of archived screenshots of these counters illustrating exactly just exactly exactly how these botnet that is various keep an operating tab of exactly how many “activebots” — hacked servers put up to relay spam — are sitting idly by and looking forward to guidelines.

One of the most than 100 panels from the exact exact exact same porn spamming operation.

In October 2016, these 100 panels reported an overall total of 1.2 million active bots running simultaneously.

At that time, it had been uncertain for me exactly exactly how this obvious botnet had been getting used, and because then a final amount of bots reporting in every day has shrunk significantly. Through the week the above-linked display shots had been taken, this botnet had significantly more than 1.2 million zombie devices or servers reporting every day (that screen shot archive includes approximately 50 % of the panels discovered).