Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Using Hacked Machines as Decoys
avi33 writes "This Wired story shows a disturbing alliance between hackers [sic] and spammers. Interestingly, they blame part of the alliance on market forces, leading some skilled engineers to the dark side for profit's sake. A Polish firm claims to have control of 450,000 Trojaned systems that it uses to mask the IP addresses of its hosted sites. In other words, you could host your Viagra-peddling site with a company that has a stringent no-spam policy, but a DNS lookup will point to a home user's compromised machine. Not quite bulletproof, but certainly ups the ante in the spam war."
an Internet visible server would then have to contact their ISP for a port to be opened
Considering the quality of customer service at my ISP, I'd better hurry up and request an open port for my Duke Nukem Forever server to be up in time.
it started as a network of hi-jacked zombie machines...
And its original purpose was more nefarious than destroying the human race: shoving SPAM down people's throats!
Most cable companies will be happy to sell you a 'commercial' account too, they'll turn off the port blocking.
Its not any faster, the customer service still sucks, and you don't get any more IP's, but you do get to pay three times as much.