More on the Moose botnet at Botconf

This week, several members of the

Virus Bulletin

team are attending Botconf 2016 in Lyon, France. Security conferences provide good opportunities to meet fellow researchers and to learn about new trends and developments, but it also interesting to see a continuation of previously presented research.

At this year’s Botconf,

GoSecure

researchers Masarah Paquet-Clouston and Olivier Bilodeau presented their research on the Moose botnet, which Olivier Bilodeau previously spoke about at VB2015 (at the time working for

ESET

).

The Moose botnet consists entirely of routers and is used to create fake social media accounts, which are then used to sell followers and appreciations, especially on

Instragram

. At Botconf, the researchers showed how this was almost the perfect cybercrime: it makes the botherders a pretty good amount of money, while the fact that there are no direct victims helps them stay under the radar of law enforcement.

We thought it was a good opportunity to upload the video of Olivier’s VB2015 presentation to our

YouTube

channel.