A massive Viagra spam campaign has been uncovered, found to be enlarged by 80,000 compromised devices.
The sheer size of the operation is notable: In the course of an investigation by Incapsula, researchers were able intercept payloads with details of 51 websites used by spammers to sell counterfeit drugs. These were located in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Ukraine, France, Taiwan, Russia, Indonesia and Romania.
Tracing back the IPs of these website researchers discovered 1,005 more active domains, presumably used by spammers. Seventy-two and two-tenths percent of these are hosted in Russia, and the rest are hosted in France.
No less impressive is the size of the botnet that controlled this network of compromised websites. Over a period of 14 days, researchers intercepted communications from 86,278 unique IPs worldwide. The firm determined that the bulk of the botnet IPs belonged to some type of web browsing devices (e.g., home computers) that were compromised through an application layer attack, such as a malicious browser add-on.
According to Incapsula, the innovative spam campaign also was built to circumvent security countermeasures.
Read More. Giant Viagra Botnet Claims 80K Devices
The sheer size of the operation is notable: In the course of an investigation by Incapsula, researchers were able intercept payloads with details of 51 websites used by spammers to sell counterfeit drugs. These were located in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Ukraine, France, Taiwan, Russia, Indonesia and Romania.
Tracing back the IPs of these website researchers discovered 1,005 more active domains, presumably used by spammers. Seventy-two and two-tenths percent of these are hosted in Russia, and the rest are hosted in France.
No less impressive is the size of the botnet that controlled this network of compromised websites. Over a period of 14 days, researchers intercepted communications from 86,278 unique IPs worldwide. The firm determined that the bulk of the botnet IPs belonged to some type of web browsing devices (e.g., home computers) that were compromised through an application layer attack, such as a malicious browser add-on.
According to Incapsula, the innovative spam campaign also was built to circumvent security countermeasures.
Read More. Giant Viagra Botnet Claims 80K Devices
