BTC English news | BTC, Latest News & Live Updates in English | English News (Latest English News) at Lokmattimes.com

Global cybersecurity company Check Point on Thursday said after a five-month research project, it exposed Phorpiex (aka Trik) botnet that is using people to unknowingly send 30,000 sextortion emails per hour."In the 5-month period that we have been monitoring this operation, we recorded transfers of more than 11 BTC to the wallets of Phorpiex sextortion - currently over $110,000," said the company.The sheer speed and volume of emails being generated is staggering, it added."The idea behind sextortion is simple - an email demands blackmail payment threatening to expose sexual content relating to the recipient if not obeyed. Many of us received such emails or know others that have," said researchers Gil Mansharov and Alexey Bukhteyev.The botnet under study uses thousands of infected hosts under its control to deliver millions of threats to innocent recipients.Phorpiex (aka Trik) botnet has been active for almost a decade and currently operates more than 450,000 infected hosts.In the past, Phorpiex monetized mostly by distributing various other malware families including GandCrab, Pony, Pushdo and used its hosts to mine cryptocurrency utilizing various cryptominers."Recently, Phorpiex has added a new form of revenue generation to its abilities; A spam bot described in the following article is used by Phorpiex to run large-scale sextortion campaigns," the findings showed.This is how the botnet works.It uses a spam bot that downloads a database of email addresses from a command and control (C&C) server.Then, an email address is randomly selected from the downloaded database, and a message is composed from several hardcoded strings.The spam bot can produce a large amount of spam emails - up to 30,000 per hour. Each individual spam campaign can cover up to 27 million potential victims."The most interesting feature of the last spam campaigns is that Phorpiex/Trik spam bot uses databases with leaked passwords in combination with email addresses," said the researchers."A victim's password usually included in a spam email message to make it more persuasive and show that password is known to the attacker. To shock the victim a spam message starts from the string with the password," they added.Leaked credential lists, containing passwords that are often not compatible with their linked email addresses, are a common inexpensive commodity."Phorpiex, a veteran botnet, has found a way to use them to generate a low maintenance, easy income on a long-term basis and is continuously propagating sextortion emails - in the millions," the researchers noted.( With inputs from IANS )

Home

City

Latest News

Cricket

LT Premium

National

International

Maharashtra

Opinions

Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar

Nagpur

Entertainment

Photos

Business

Technology

Sports

Lifestyle

Social Viral

Lokmat Games

Health

Ahmedabad Plane Crash

Pune Bridge Collapse

Maharashtra News

Mumbai Local

Weather Update

Mumbai Rains

BtcFOLLOW

Btc, Latest News

Business :MahaDAO's ARTH goes live in India; over 5000 investors foresee a solution to currency depreciation

MahaDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governed by its users, the MAHA community, are officially launching the first epoch for ARTH, the world's first non - depreciating currency. ...

Business :Cryptocurrency news at OctaFX: Trading upgrades and new entries (BCH & XRP)

After having Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) and Ethereum (ETH) on offer for some time, the Forex broker OctaFX has decided to include some more. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ripple (XRP) are the most recent entries. ...

National :Shah terms pact with NDFB as historic, announces Rs 1,500 cr package for development of Bodo areas

Terming the agreement with all factions of the banned National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) as 'historic,' Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said the pact is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision for the progress of the Nort ...

National :Centre signs tripartite peace accord with Bodo rebel group

The Central government on Monday signed a tripartite agreement with the representatives of all factions of the banned orgsation -- National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) -- here. ...

Technology :Malware sending 30,000 'sextortion' emails per hour: Report

A malware is sending 30,000 sextortion emails per hour after taking over people's inboxes and have, till date, sent 27 million such emails to innocent persons with a threat to expose sexual content captured via their webcams for blackmail payments. ...