Qrator Labs discovered new data mining botnet

Helga SmithJanuary 31, 2022Last Updated: January 31, 2022
14 1 minute read

Qrator Labs has summed up the results of the fourth quarter of 2021 and discovered a new data mining botnet with 160,097 devices. This is almost three times more than in the third quarter, and more than in any other quarter of 2021.

Interestingly, this botnet was not used at all for organizing DDoS attacks, but for data mining by one of the retail companies.

Botnets of this magnitude do not set records in terms of request intensity and bandwidth: their task is to extract commercially significant data consistently and daily without arousing suspicion from defense mechanisms. The smaller the proportion of work that each individual device has to do, the more difficult it is to detect it in the mass of users and block it. It is difficult to fight this activity with the help of reputational analysis, speed limits and IP blocks – legitimate users will inevitably fall under the knife. It is required to be able to identify visitors, assess the integrity of the digital environment of their devices, which advanced bots are good at forging, and make a decision to deny access individually for each unfair treatment. This is helped by expertise in the operation of web browsers and mobile applications, knowledge of the goals of bot activity and technical means to achieve them.comments Georgy Tarasov, product manager at Qrator Labs.

The company also notes a record number of unique BGP incidents related to traffic interception: during November, 17,798 autonomous systems generated BGP hijacks, which accounted for 16.3% of the total number of autonomous systems in the world.

Another BGP “record” was set by the number of BGP route leaks per month. So, December 2021 showed a record number of route leaks – more than 10,000,000. This is almost twice as many as in the first two months of the fourth quarter.

Data mining botnet

The total route leaks in the fourth quarter are more than twice as high as in the third quarter – 19,852,504 in the fourth quarter versus 7,589,347 in the third.

According to Qrator Labs statistics, education and e-commerce were the most attacked industries in the fourth quarter, with a significant lead. The growth in the number of attacks on these segments was 12.29% and 10.21%, respectively. Payment systems are in third place with 9.75%. Banks, which accounted for a fantastic 22.28% of all DDoS attacks last quarter, were only targeted 5% of the time in the fourth quarter.

Also, almost every quarter, the company detects a shift in the distribution of attack vectors. So, in the fourth quarter of 2021, the top three most popular DDoS attack vectors included:

  1. UDP flood from 33.75%;
  2. SYN flood from 22.71%;
  3. And IP flood from 20.21%.

Data mining botnet

This is a reversal of statistics compared to the third quarter, but the picture is similar to that observed in the second quarter of 2021. Although in the previous quarter under review, IP flooding accounted for more than half of all attacks, the leader of the fourth quarter, UDP flooding, is responsible for only a third.

Let me remind you that we also wrote that Pink botnet was infected over 1.5 million devices, and also that the Chinese authorities have arrested the authors of the Mozi botnet.

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Helga SmithJanuary 31, 2022Last Updated: January 31, 2022
14 1 minute read

Helga Smith

I was always interested in computer sciences, especially data security and the theme, which is called nowadays "data science", since my early teens. Before coming into the Virus Removal team as Editor-in-chief, I worked as a cybersecurity expert in several companies, including one of Amazon's contractors. Another experience: I have got is teaching in Arden and Reading universities.

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