The Many Tentacles of the Necurs Botnet

This post was written by Jaeson Schultz.

Introduction

Over the past five years the Necurs botnet has established itself as the largest purveyor of spam worldwide. Necurs is responsible for emailing massive amounts of banking malware, ransomware, dating spam, pump-n-dump stock scams, work from home schemes, and even cryptocurrency wallet credential phishing. Necurs sends so much spam that at times Necurs’ spam campaigns can make up more than 90% of the spam seen by Cisco Talos in one day.

To conduct a deeper analysis of Necurs, Talos extracted 32 distinct spam campaigns sent by Necurs between August 2017 and November 2017. The result was a collection of over 2.1 million spam messages, sent from almost 1.2 million distinct sending IP addresses in over 200 countries and territories.