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Heise Online Reveals Trojan / Spam Connection

Posted by timothy on from the how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people dept.

yourruinreverse writes "Virus distributors have been caught red-handed selling IP addresses of trojan-infected machines by editors of the German IT magazine c't. Several individuals appear to have been arrested already after c't, revealing one of the virus writer's nationality as British, passed on the information to Scotland Yard. Check out the German article first, then its translation on Groklaw and maybe also same translation posted in the English section of the Heise website (in order of appearance)."

6 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. A maturing industry... by erick99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Maybe this isn't so surprising. Virus writers are becoming, as the gangsters in movies like to say, "a business man." Capitalism will grow in any sort of soil. I'm not supporting this by any means, but, sociologically, it sure makes a point about how any "industry" or endeavor will eventually start to emulate more legitimate enterprises.

    Keep Smiling!

    Erick

    --
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  2. I new it! by megalogeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OK, we all knew it, but maybe this will be enough incentive for the major news outlets to pick the story up. In an ideal world people would see this story, realize that much of the spam they get can be blamed on viruses and patch their systems.

    Too bad we don't live in a perfect world.

  3. Re:Theo article by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Uh. Why do you think zombie networks and selling access to them wasn't a problem earlier?

    Viruses are finally sophisticated enough to create botnets, and spammers have become more and more desperate for ways to pump their e-mail out.

  4. The factor neglected most often.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The machines infected with the trojans can be used as spam relays.. sure - but at the same time theyre also a gold mine for fraud, just think about all the data stored on the hard drives available for download - financial data, all kinds of private documents.. this worries me more than spam. I think data theft will become a hotter topic in the near future.

  5. Re:The outlawed triangle... by datadood · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Insightful? In what way is P2P filesharing 'illegal'? It might get used for copyright infringement, but that doesn't mean the tool itself is illegal. Think crowbar.

  6. Re:Open Relays by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Most spammers don't use open relays these days. They use open proxies, which are different. (No logging in the Received lines of the email, and no store/forward--it's the spammer's machine doing the real work.)

    From some of the spam I've been getting, I think that some spammers are playing with zombie relay malware. That allows them to load up a whole spam run on a zombie machine and move on to the next one. I'll bet that their relay software is designed to not look like an open relay to anyone else. Why share the box with other spammers, and why set off open relay detectors?

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