Neutrino Exploit Kit: No Signs of Life

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Neutrino Exploit Kit: No Signs of Life

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Poor Profits May Have Driven Developers Out of Botnet-Building Business

Neutrino Exploit Kit: No Signs of Life
The volume of attacks tied to Neutrino has flatlined in recent months. (Source: F-Secure)

Good news: The Neutrino botnet may be dead.

See Also: Balancing Fraud Detection & the Consumer Banking Experience

In recent months, security researchers have noticed that the botnet – once big and bad – appears to have gone dormant.

“R.I.P. Neutrino exploit kit. We’ll miss you (not),” say researchers at security firm F-Secure via Twitter, noting that they have seen no Neutrino-related activity for nearly three months.

The French anti-malware researcher known as Kafeine also reported Wednesday that “after eight months of ‘private mode’ activity, it seems Neutrino waves are now dead flat” – since April 10.

The most recently traced Neutrino campaigns. (Source: Kafeine)

From Cybercrime Hero to Zero

That’s significant, because Neutrino – aka Kasidet – at one time ranked as one of the world’s most popular exploit kits. Also known as exploit packs, these tools enable anyone – no coding experience required – to run large-scale campaigns designed to infect massive quantities of PCs with malware, turning them into “zombie” nodes in a botnet.

Exploits kits typically do this by infecting legitimate websites with malicious code, then launching drive-by attacks against website visitors, probing their systems for known weaknesses. “Exploit kits … automate the exploitation of client-side vulnerabilities, often targeting browsers and applications that a website can invoke through the browser,” according to a Neutrino teardown published by security firm Malwarebytes. “Known exploit targets have been vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader, Java Runtime Environment, and Adobe Flash Player.”

Some botnets are private and used exclusively by a single cybercrime gang – often tied to an organized crime syndicate. Others get monetized by developers who rent them out to other attackers, either as a way of infecting systems, or else by using already infected systems on demand, to send large amounts of spam, distribute malware or launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against customer-designated targets.

In the dog-eat-dog cybercrime ecosystem, however, it appears that Neutrino’s developer lost market share to rivals.

“I spoke with the [developer] a long while ago he explained it was no longer profitable,” one U.S.-based malware researcher says via Twitter.

Neutrino Was Big in 2016


The most recently seen banner advertisement for Neutrino, from Sept. 16, 2016. (Source: Kafeine)

As of July 2016, Neutrino dominated the exploit kit scene and appeared lucrative. For example, researchers at Cisco Talos also reported that Neutrino was so popular that its authors had raised its rental price to $7,000 per month, likely at least in partial response to the sudden disappearance of Angler, one of its chief rivals.

As of the next month, Check Point reported that 11 percent of all payments by victims of Cerber ransomware could be traced to an initial infection caused by a Neutrino exploit kit.

In September 2016, however, Neutrino’s owners suddenly announced that they would henceforth operate solely in “private mode,” for a small, selected group of clients. “We are closed. No new rents, no extends more,” Neutrino’s authors wrote in Jabber/XMPP messages sent to their existing clients that month, anti-malware site Bleeping Computer reports.

The move may have been a reaction to Cisco’s security and research group Talos and domain registrar GoDaddy successfully disrupting two large, global malvertising campaigns being launched via Neutrino the same month.

By October 2016, meanwhile, Kafeine reported a dramatic decline in Neutrino-related activity, reporting that there only appeared to be two active campaigns tied to the botnet. And by April, Neutrino appeared to have disappeared completely.

No Dearth of Alternatives

To be clear, however, there are numerous active botnets of Neutrino’s ilk, as have been tracked, for example, by the Execute Malware blog.

Currently active exploit kits. (Source: Execute Malware)

Some security experts say Neutrino has been supplanted by RIG, an exploit kit that has been its chief rival since 2016, and which has since become the dominant player.

Meanwhile, is Neutrino finished, or just resting?

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