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Over 43 million email addresses have leaked from the command and control server of a spam botnet, a security researcher has told Bleeping Computer today.
The leaky server came to light while a threat intelligence analyst from Vertek Corporation, was looking into a recent malware campaign distributing a version of the Trik trojan, which was later infecting users with a second-stage payload —the GandCrab 3 ransomware.
The Vertek researcher discovered that Trik and GandCrab would download the malicious files that infected users’ systems from an online server located on a Russian IP address.
The researcher told Bleeping Computer that the group behind this operation misconfigured its server and left its content accessible to anyone accessing the IP directly.
On this server, he discovered 2201 text files, labeled sequentially from 1.txt to 2201.txt containing chunks of roughly 20,000 email addresses, each.
The Vertek researcher believes the operators of this server have been using these recipient lists to service other crooks who contracted their services to distribute various malware strains via malspam campaigns.
Server leaks 43,555,741 unique email addresses
« We pulled all of them to validate that they are unique and legitimate, » the researcher told Bleeping Computer earlier today. « Out of 44,020,000 potential addresses, 43,555,741 are unique. »
The researcher is now working with Australian security expert Troy Hunt, the owner of the Have I Been Pwned service, to determine how many of these emails are new and how many have been previously leaked in other data dumps.
« The email addresses are from everywhere, » the researcher told us. » There were 4.6 million unique email domains. Everything from .gov to .com, and domain of several private businesses. »
The Vertek researcher has analyzed the files and broke down the email addresses per domain. In a list the researcher shared with us earlier today (embedded at the bottom of this article), he points out that the vast majority of email addresses are old, from antiquated email services such as Yahoo (10.6 million) and AOL (8.3 million).
Surprisingly, while there are many custom email domains included in the leak, there are very few Gmail addresses included, suggesting the email addresses database is either incomplete, or this malware campaign intentionally targeted users using older email services.
The Trik trojan
The Trik trojan is a classic malware downloader. It infects computers and assembles them into a giant botnet. The botnet’s operators use these computers to send out new spam campaigns, or they sell « install space » to other crooks, allowing them to deliver more pontent threats to Trik victims, similarly to how they rented install space to the GandCrab crew for the campaign Vertek stumbled on.
The Trik trojan has been an active threat for at least a decade but has recently seen a resurgence, according to this Proofpoint report.
In its earlier days, the malware operated primarily as a worm that self-spread via removable USB storage devices, Skype, or Windows Live Messenger chats. These worm-based variants had previously been tracked under the name of Phorpiex.
The malware evolved into a fully-fledged trojan years later, when it forked the codebase of the SDBot trojan and started using email spam as its main delivery & infection mechanism, while also switching to an IRC-controlled botnet architecture.
Trik is not the first spam botnet to leak its email addresses database. In August 2017, a spam operation known as Onliner leaked 711 email addresses that it was using to spam users.
At the time of writing, the Trik C&C server that’s leaking email addresses keeps going offline at intermittent intervals.
Top 100 email domains included in the leaked data:
8907436 yahoo.com 8397080 aol.com 788641 comcast.net 433419 yahoo.co.in 432129 sbcglobal.net 414912 msn.com 316128 rediffmail.com 294427 yahoo.co.uk 286835 yahoo.fr 282279 verizon.net 244341 bellsouth.net 234718 cox.net 227209 earthlink.net 221737 yahoo.com.br 191098 ymail.com 174848 att.net 156851 btinternet.com 139885 libero.it 120120 yahoo.es 117175 charter.net 112566 mac.com 111248 mail.ru 107810 juno.com 92141 optonline.net 86967 yahoo.ca 78964 me.com 73341 yahoo.com.ar 71545 yahoo.in 71200 rocketmail.com 69757 wanadoo.fr 68645 rogers.com 65629 yahoo.it 65017 shaw.ca 64091 ig.com.br 63045 163.com 62375 uol.com.br 57764 free.fr 57617 yahoo.com.mx 57066 web.de 56507 orange.fr 56309 sympatico.ca 54767 aim.com 51352 cs.com 50256 bigpond.com 48455 terra.com.br 43135 yahoo.co.id 41533 netscape.net 40932 alice.it 39737 sky.com 39116 yahoo.com.au 38573 bol.com.br 38558 YAHOO.COM 37882 excite.com 37788 mail.com 37572 tiscali.co.uk 37361 mindspring.com 37350 tiscali.it 36636 HOTMAIL.COM 36429 ntlworld.com 34771 netzero.net 33414 prodigy.net 33208 126.com 32821 yandex.ru 32526 planet.nl 32496 yahoo.com.cn 31167 qq.com 30831 embarqmail.com 30751 adelphia.net 30536 telus.net 30005 hp.com 29160 yahoo.de 28290 roadrunner.com 27558 skynet.be 26732 telenet.be 26299 wp.pl 26135 talktalk.net 26072 pacbell.net 26051 t-online.de 25929 netzero.com 25917 optusnet.com.au 25897 virgilio.it 25525 home.nl 25227 videotron.ca 24881 blueyonder.co.uk 24462 peoplepc.com 24435 windstream.net 24079 xtra.co.nz 23465 bluewin.ch 23375 us.army.mil 22433 hetnet.nl 22247 trainingelite.com 22021 yahoo.com.sg 21689 laposte.net 21336 ge.com 21130 frontiernet.net 21055 q.com 21034 mchsi.com 20882 webtv.net 20830 abv.bg 19425 insightbb.com To read the original article: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/trik-spam-botnet-leaks-43-million-email-addresses/
