Writing Viruses for Fun and Profit

JMPrice writes "There's a short article over at zdnet that explores a future synergy between viruses and spam, i.e. international crackdown on spam and open relays makes spammers opt to use infected computers instead as relays, and speculates a relationship between the virus writers and spammers."

Comments

Re:Soblig

[Spudley]

Should I expect to find "herbal remedies" in this zip file?

Duh. It'll be a bigger pen1s, of course. What else would you expect to find if you open a zip?

And for that matter, why did you think this virus is called "So Big?"

Stop spam by going after the source

[zornorph]

Everytime I see an article about spam, it always seems to be trying to stop spam after the fact (closing relays, using spamassassin, etc). Why not go after the source instead? If you do get spam, don't bother trying to hunt through email headers and all that, look for contact numbers/emails in the spam that are listed for the 'product' in question. Call them and complain. Sometimes, the company selling the product may not know their promotion is being carried out via spamming, and won't pay that company to spam again. If enough companies realize they are pissing off their potential customers, they just might stop paying the spammers. Once there is no money left in spamming, it will naturally stop on its own.

Of course, this doesn't address those who don't care or already know they are getting their message out via spam, but at least it would make a good start to reducing my inbox total.