Spammers Using Hacked Machines as Decoys

Posted by michael on Thursday October 9, 2003 @07:29AM from the there's-gotta-be-a-law dept.

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."

3 of 413 comments (clear)

Spam would go away... by BJZQ8 · 2003-10-09 07:35 · Score: 0, Troll

If we broke more thumbs and kneecaps
Re:Firewall by geoffspear · 2003-10-09 07:40 · Score: 0, Troll

Or ISPs could just ban Windows machines from their network, which would have the same effect without inconveniencing people with real computers.

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Polish firm? by captainstupid · 2003-10-09 08:42 · Score: 0, Troll

Why is a polish firm releasing studies about the internet? I'm not likely to believe anything that Kiwi says about the internet.

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