Farewell Neosploit?

The past couple of years has seen a dramatic rise in the sheer number of pieces of malware out there on the internet, hence, associated attacks. One of the contributory factors to the dramatic volume increase in attacks  has been the arrival of ‘do-it-yourself’ infections kits. One of the most infamous of these is Neosploit, but there are many others such as Mpack, IcePack, Cyber Bot, Zunker etc.

Neosploit allowed a budding ‘hacker’ to launch their own exploits  and amass a sizable botnet. There were regular updates and even a user forum. However, the other day, a posting appeared on a Russian web site announcing that the authors of Neosploit were going to retire the product. The translation in effect announced:

 “Unfortunately, supporting our product is no longer possible. We apologize for any inconvenience, but business is business since the amount of time spent on this project does not justify itself.
We tried hard to satisfy our clients’ needs during the last few months, but the support had to end at some point. We were 1.5 years with you and hope that this was a good time for your business.”

So, it seems that the authors of Neosploit just couldn’t make it work from a commercial sense. That  got me to thinking, why? Is it because the cost of them coming up with new exploits is becoming more difficult, hence costly? I do not see any particular evidence as to this. There are other tool-kits out there and many new exploits being developed on-going.

Could it be, that they are being ‘boxed in’ by better security? Well, to be fair on this one, we are finding many more exploits, so this may not be the case. Is it that the market dynamics of the ‘under-ground economy’, ultimately played against them? Well, like every efficient market, there have been new entrants and competitors to Neosploit, who could compete with them on product and price. Therein may well be the answer.

So, farewell Neosploit, but there are other exploit tool-kits out there and no doubt, new ones will make it onto the ‘market’. 

July 31, 2008 | Filed Under Security, Spam, Technology 

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