Aggressive Botnet Activities Behind Spam Increase

An anonymous reader writes, "A spam-sending Trojan dubbed 'SpamThru' is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru employed numerous tactics to thwart detection and enhance outreach, such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection." According to MessageLabs (PDF), another contributor to the recent spam increase is a trojan dropper called "Warezov."

Comments

enforcement@sec.gov

[RT Alec]

Forward the message to mailto:enforcement@sec.gov. Use Thunderbird or another mail client that does not strip or mangle the original headers (like Outlook does).

The SEC will devote significant resources investigating and often prosecuting the people who are behind these scams.

Re:enforcement@sec.gov

[XSforMe]

If you are using outlook, you can use OLSpamCop to rescue the headers and report to pretty much anyone any spam (including enforcement@sec.gov). It is a free download available here: http://www.olspamcop.org/doc.shtml#install

But I seriously doubt the SEC will be interested in origin of the SPAM. More likely they will do an audit on the fraudulent symbol. It usually is much more effective than tracing the origin of the spam, and it is more likely asses will get busted and the criminals (the people who proffit from the poor schmucks buying the stock) will get sent to jail.

Nevertheless, if you want to report and spam, use spamcop so we can mitigate the damage done from the source before it pumps more shit onto the net.

Re:This needs a tag.

[dch24]

If you don't like how everything is getting tagged itsatrap, you can tag it !itsatrap, and vote against the tag. Enough !itsatrap votes, and the tag will be taken off the story.

OT: why is everything a trap today?

[Mateo_LeFou]

Is there a joke I'm not in on?

Re:OT: why is everything a trap today?

[necro2607]

This page explains the "it's a trap" inside joke well enough, although I don't know what the deal is behind tagging comments with itsatrap today in particular.

Re:(offtopic) sending attachments

[secolactico]

In Outlook 2003, I didn't find how to forward as attachment. You have to copy the headers from the properties window, and paste them in your forwarded message. Far too complicated to explain over the phone to someone who doesn't have a clue

Compose a new message, then drag the message you want to forward from the Inbox (or whatever folder) into the new message windows. That's it.

If you want to see the headers of a message, open it and select "View" and "Options".

I wish outlook had a "view source" like that of thunderbird or Gmail, where it lets me see the raw message in ascii (great for spamassassin testing).

Re:There's others making money too

[LindseyJ]

Saying the MS is "The source of the problem" is like coming to a murder scene where someone was stabbed with a kitchen knife, and then blaming the cutlery retailer for it. Both are patently rediculous.

MS does not have any 'responsibility' to make sure nobody using their OS is up to no good. Nor should they. If the precident is set that you are responsible for what people ultimately do with your product, nobody will every make anything ever again, fearing litigation. The fact that they are a monopoly is irrelivent. And as for the post you made after this one... That taxation and/or bond scheme might be the most backwards thing I have ever heard. OS's are prohibitively expensive to the home user as it is, without artifically inflating the price by forcing me to buy insurance (for what, I have no idea).

Yet another attempt to sidestep personal accountability, and of course it's modded up.