Botnets Serving Up More Multipurpose Malware

Dr. Eduardo Rocha Senior Solutions Engineer & Security Analyst @ GlobalDots
2 Min read

Attackers increasingly are distributing malware that can be used for a variety of different tasks, Kaspersky Lab says.

Reduce your AWS costs by over 50%

Discover your Cloud Saving Potential – Answer just 5 simple questions. AppsFlyer, Playtika, Lufthansa, IBM, top leading companies are already using our FinOps services.

Reduce your AWS costs 
by over 50%

In a troubling trend for enterprises, an analysis of botnet activity in the first six months of 2018 shows that multifunctional malware tools are becoming increasingly popular among attackers.

Kaspersky Lab inspected more than 150 malware families and their modifications across some 60,000 botnets around the world and found that the share of multipurpose Remote Access Tools has almost doubled on botnets since the beginning of 2017 – from 6.5% to 12.2%.

The three most widespread of these RATs or backdoors—Njrat, DarkComet, and Nanocore—are all malware tools that attackers can relatively easily modify for different purposes or adapt for distribution in specific regions. Kaspersky Lab discovered Njrat to have command and control centers in 99 countries, mainly because of how easily attackers can use it to configure a personal backdoor with very little knowledge of malware development. Nanocore and DarkComet have C2 centers in over 80 countries for the same reason.

Similarly, Trojans capable of being modified and controlled by different command and control servers and used for different purposes were another category of malware that grew in Q1, though not quite as dramatically as RATs. Kaspersky Lab’s analysis showed that the share of such Trojans increased from 32.9% in the second half of 2017 to around 34.3% in the first six months of 2018.

Over the same period, the proportion of single-purpose tools being distributed through botnets declined substantially. For example, the share of special-purpose banking Trojans distributed via botnets dropped over 9.2%, from around 22.5% in the second half of 2017 to 13.3% of all malicious files in the first half of 2018.

Image Source

Read more: Dark Reading

Latest Articles

Project FOCUS: A New Age of FinOps Visibility

It’s easy for managers and team leaders to get caught up in the cultural scrum of FinOps. Hobbling many FinOps projects, however, is a lack of on-the-ground support for the DevOps teams that are having to drive this widespread change – this is how all too many FinOps projects become abandoned on the meeting room […]

Nesh (Steven Puddephatt) Senior Solutions Engineer @ GlobalDots
27th March, 2024
Optimize Your Cloud Spend with a FinOps Maturity Assessment

Achieving FinOps is a tall order: it demands a degree of organizational self-awareness that some companies are constantly battling for. Consider the predicament that many teams find themselves in: while their cloud environments may contain a number of small things that could be optimized, there are no single glaring mistakes that are consuming massive quantities […]

Nesh (Steven Puddephatt) Senior Solutions Engineer @ GlobalDots
27th March, 2024
Terraform Best Practices Checklist

Enhance your Terraform skills with 13 proven techniques curated by our DevOps experts. Gain insights on module optimization, state file management, advanced version control, and many more key topics.   Reduce your AWS costs by over 50% Discover your Cloud Saving Potential – Answer just 5 simple questions. AppsFlyer, Playtika, Lufthansa, IBM, top leading companies are already […]

Developer AXE-WEB
27th March, 2024
Efficient Cluster Management

Developers and DevOps teams, it’s time to make Kubernetes simple, efficient, and easy to manage. Download our comprehensive guide to efficient cluster management to learn how to turn Kubernetes into a well-oiled machine. This guide offers: Reduce your AWS costs by over 50% Discover your Cloud Saving Potential – Answer just 5 simple questions. AppsFlyer, […]

Developer AXE-WEB
27th March, 2024

Unlock Your Cloud Potential

Schedule a call with our experts. Discover new technology and get recommendations to improve your performance.

Unlock Your Cloud Potential