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NYT Reports Porn Spam Hijacking Network
twitter writes "This NYT story describes how thousands of PCs have been used as porn spambots and reverse proxy servers, and mentions that they could be used for kiddie porn. Finally, though Microsoft is not mentioned, people might start to understand what a monoculture of poor quality software enables."
Try this link
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Whatever. That won't happen anytime soon.
Just as an example, we brought a remote user's laptop into the shop the other day to update it and found over 250 infected files. Even though we provide the option everytime he logs in to update the virus identites, they hadn't been updated in over a year.
To many people, a computer is like a screwdriver. They could care less about it, they just want to pick it up, make it work, and toss it aside when they are done with it. It's unfortunate, yes, but that's just the way it is.
Ryan O'Rourke
There is a technical writeup here:
http://www.lurhq.com/migmaf.html
Mirror: http://www.joestewart.org/migmaf.html
The article makes a good point about unwitting hosts participating in world-wide spamming. A host that is insecure can become compromised by an automated worm or mailicous attacker and then configured to relay junk mail.
As a system administrator this worries me. Typically we use blocklists for netblocks that are known to be sources of spam. But when a random internet host is compromised and used as a mail relay, this slips past our blocklists (for a while).
The moral of the story is that computer security and spam fighting go together. Though average users don't get the point, it is every internet user's responsibility to keep their host secure both for their own good, and to be a good neighbour.
Is the problem just one of your e-mail being harvested off the webpage(s)? If so, try this:
<script language="JavaScript">
function writeAddress(name, domain, msg) {
document.write('<a href="mailto:' + name + '@' + domain + '">');
document.write(msg);
document.writeln('</a>');
}
</script>
Blah blah blah
<script language="JavaScript">
writeAddress('mymail', 'nospam.com', 'E-mail me!');
</script>
Now you've produced a document which displays links to e-mail addresses, without specifying any easily-harvested e-mail addresses in the source of the document.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.