Necurs botnet distributed spam pushing Swisscoin cryptocurrency

Necurs, one of the largest known spam bot, distributed spam emails promoting an ill repute cryptocurrency named Swisscoin, reported BleepingComputer. The well-known pump & dump strategy usually used for manipulating stocks of companies has been applied in cryptocurrency environment on large scale for the first time. The actual impact is hard to measure because the first spam emails were distributed on the same day the Swisscoin currency was released for trading after more than 50 days of suspension period. The pump & dump manipulations of cryptocurrencies are not new. For example Business Insider wrote about pump & dump cryptocurrency market manipulations in November 2017.