Sun, 22 Feb 2004

Trojans as spam robots: the evidence

I've suspected this based on the evidence I've seen from infected machines, but I always assumed that the virus writer was in the direct employ of the spammer, not that a "market" for lists of compromised machine IP's had developed.

Security experts and spam fighters have always assumed that spammers use Trojans to turn home workstations into unwitting hosts or zombies in pornography and spam distribution rings. Not only can these techniques be used to bypass IP address blacklists, but also to launch DoS attacks.

(link) [The Register]

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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