McAfee: Two Botnets Behind 97 Percent Of All Spam In Q4

Two botnets accounted for 97 percent of all spam sent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to McAfee in a new report. These are the Necurs and Gamut botnets, which are rented by spammers for sending spam, phishing emails and malware.

Necurs was the most used with a share of 60 percent, followed by Gamut with 37 percent ( pdf ). According to McAfee, Necurs is currently the largest spambot network in the world. The contaminated machines that are part of the botnet are controlled via a peer-to-peer model. In the fourth quarter of last year, the Locky ransomware and Dridex bank malware were sent via Necurs, among other things. Gamut focused more on e-mails during this period to recruit money mules and phishing e-mails.

Research: 8% Instagram Accounts Is A Spambot

Almost one in twelve accounts on Instagram photo service is specially created to send only spam messages. It claims a group of Italian researchers, more than 10.2 million accounts were monitoring the website. In addition to analyzing the accounts of celebrities she also bought 20,000 fake accounts from ten different providers for an amount of one hundred dollars and kept in the hole for a month.

The study showed that 7.9% of Instagram accounts behaves like spambot. It also showed that nearly 30% of users are inactive and places less than one photo or video per month. In December last year decided to tackle spam bots Instagram, but the problem seems to be still present. "Despite the cleaning of last December and new" countermeasures "to stop this development, there is still a lack of transparency about internal data, there are few studies on the presence of spambots, especially on Instagram," the researchers said.

In their study called "Instagram spam bots and social media Popularity" they say that Instagram, now everyone on the platform to advertise, to take measures to create a level playing field for everyone and should show more respect for users of social media platforms. Instagram claims to have over 300 million users .