Quote:In a new report by Check Point Research, researchers show how the Phorpiex botnet is being used to distribute millions of sextortion emails and are generating a tidy sum doing so.

The almost decade old Phorpiex botnet, otherwise known as Trik, is a worm that spreads via email. Once a machine is infected, the malware will download further malware onto an infected computer or perform other malicious activity, such as using the computer to send spam.

Check Point Research has recently discovered that Phorpiex has added a new payload that acts as a spam bot to distribute sextortion emails.
"The spam bot is one of the final payloads in each Phorpiex campaign observed in 2019," the researchers stated in their report. "The Phorpiex spam bot doesn’t have its own persistence mechanism, as it is downloaded and executed by other Phorpiex modules."