If you’re shopping around for a way to stop bots damaging your brand – be that through enabling automated fraud, hoarding your stock, scraping your content or prices, or just eating up server resources – you’ve probably seen vendors advocating the use of “client-side detection”. They’re probably telling you it’s necessary for accurate bot detection.
As reported widely in the press, the Genesis Market is no more. On Tuesday 4th April 2023, the FBI seized control of the infamous marketplace that’d had hundreds of thousands of stolen digital identities for sale, replacing its login page with a takedown notice and call for further information from its users.
As part of our recently released 2022 Threat Roundup report, Forescout Vedere Labs described how the Mirai IoT botnet continues to evolve via new variants and adaptations, such as Gafgyt and RapperBot, more than six years after it started taking over IoT devices and had its source code leaked.
In January 2023, PrivateLoader, a malware loader from a pay-per-install malware distribution service called “ruzki”, started to distribute Tofsee (a.k.a. Gheg), a modular spambot. Spambots are typically utilized by cybercriminals to spread malware and phishing emails, and this particular one has been in operation since at least 2008.
Emotet is undoubtedly a very resilient botnet. Even though its operation was disrupted by Europol in January 2021, Emotet came back a few months later and continues to spread. In May 2022, shortly after Microsoft released new controls related to malicious macros, Netskope Threat Labs analyzed an Emotet campaign where they were testing a new delivery method, by using LNK files.
