This Valentine’s Day brings along Dating Spam

Valentine's Day as much an opportunity for singles can mean difficult too, as zombie bots look towards exploiting their lonesome condition.

On February 12, cloud-based platform IBM X-Force a specialist in computer threat solutions said there was a rise in bulk dating e-mails being spewed from Necurs network of bots. It was during January when the problem picked up while may increase with the approach of Valentine's Day.

Technology Company Cisco states the Necurs network of bots happened to be the greatest generator of spam in the world. The bot involves malicious software which filches people's banking details, produces bogus dating advertisements, creates penny stock frauds, touts fake schemes of 'work from household,' as well as runs other phishing campaigns. According to a Cisco report, 90% of the junk e-mails the company's Cisco Talos the cyber intelligence investigation team encountered on a daily basis originated from Necurs. Newsweek.com posted this, February 12, 2018.

Controlling over 6m zombie bots, Necurs network of bots infamously spews massive spam messages. The current romance-themed spam campaign seemingly has been behind over 230m junk e-mails during the past fortnight, with mean amounts exceeding 30m messages daily. The spammers continuously change the resources used for distributing the spam schemes, while the Internet Protocols from where a scheme is originated aren't again utilized for the next scheme for eschewing blocking and blacklisting.

Last year (2017) for example, massive volumes of "pump-and-dump" penny stock fraudulent campaigns originated from Necurs that were crafted for duping recipients into thinking the value of certain penny stock would soon rise. Just as a lot of people purchased that stock creating an artificial boost, the share value actually rose. Then the scammers got into the position to dump their shares at the inflated price, thus churning huge profits. On the other hand now the artificially valued shares plummeted back to the original price, with people who bought them simply running into losses.

Some simplified measures are advised with which consumers can stay safe from becoming victimized with fake dating e-mails. These are, according to Kessem, not to reply to such e-mails that are purely based on socially-engineered tactics.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/21/2018