The Necurs botnet has been active for some time. In 2014,
Virus Bulletin
published a 3-part article by Peter Ferrie (
1
,
2
,
3
) who had studied the botnet in great detail. And although, as is typical for botnets, Necurs’ activities can be somewhat volatile, it has been used for some notorious and malicious spam campaigns in recent years.
Earlier this year, I
wrote about
how the Flawed Ammyy remote access trojan (RAT) was being pushed to some more interesting Necurs-infected devices, and I also mentioned that the same RAT had been spread by a Necurs-spam campaign. This particular campaign was analysed by
Avast
researchers Jan Sirmer and Adolf Streda, who delivered a
last-minute presentation
about it at VB2018.
Script run directly from remote storage.
Jan and Adolf have written a paper for VB describing the branch of Necurs they have been monitoring, the changes it has undergone in the course of a year, and presenting an analysis of Flawed Ammy. You can read the paper in both
HTML
and
PDF
format.
We have also uploaded the video of their VB2018 presentation to our
YouTube
channel.
This week, Jan and Adolf will speak once again about their research at
Botconf
in Toulouse, France. As in previous years, members of the
Virus Bulletin
will be attending Botconf.
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