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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."
...is getting only 75% spam.
Mine is more like 1 real email for every 200 spam messages...
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
sites like freerepublic avoid dupes like this by having a rule that the subject of the article be used for the posting. Then, checking for a dupe is just a matter of a search for the exact same subject. Its simple and works a lot better.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
IANASB, but by the time you read the spam email, it's probably already too late. These people buy stocks before they blast out the spam, and sell them to the suckers that think they are going to get in early and dump later. Now, if you were really clever, you could probably figure a way to make money shorting them, but that would be unethical as well, not to mention very risky.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Its time we force ISPs to pull the plug on infected client machines or block entire ISPs. There is no valid argument to support end users who refuse to clean up their machines. The argument that either they are not responsible for the infection or are unable to clean their own machines is crap. If end users don't know how to maintain their equipment then perhaps they should be off the net.
Look at a car as an example. If I refuse to do or pay for routine maintenance it will begin to create more and more pollution and use more and more fuel. Is it the manufactures job to fix it, no, is it the road builders job, no, is it the jerks that sold me crappy fuel, only if I can catch them. So when I fail smog tests I need to either quit using the car or pay to fix it. Might not be the best analogy.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
You mean educate people so they don't fall for scams? So they think for themselves? So they know that offers that are too good to be true can't be true?
Are you nuts? Are you aware that this would mean to the market? People able and willing to compare prices before buying, people having used cars inspected before buying them, people informing themselves about the appliances they buy and who don't blindly believe the ads.
Do you know just how many jobs hang on the fact that 99% of the people around are suckers, incapable of sorting out their own life?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Um, and do you also think scantilly clad women deserve to get raped?
A pump and dump scheme simply selects a stock with the right combination of price and volume that they think they can manipulate.
Take the EGLY.OB example (heh, it's up 6% right now). It is a low priced (under a dollar) stock, so lots of shares are cheap. It has sufficient volume (100K shares/day) to be useful. If it is too thinly traded you can't accumulate shares on the cheap. If the volume is too high, the market will keep the dumpers shares low.
So, the spammers are doing a buy-low, "advertise" (pump it up), sell-high (dump) campaign. The particular stock selected was probably just a result of a screen for the desired trading properties.
The company whose stock is manipulated (most likely) had nothing to do with it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
instead of spending $$$ and time trying to prevent spam from arriving in our inbox we should spend that money and time educating the crowd
I see you don't know much about that part of "the crowd" who falls for the spammers/phishers/etc. tricks.
Even if you could educate them all, new suckers are born every day.
The sad thing about it is that among them, there are even nice and clever people, who just have the particularity to be ignorant and naive in front of a computer...
You are absolutely correct - the real question is, will we fix it (meaning us geeks and maintainers of the internet to develop and implement a new and more secure mail protocol and roll it out internetwork-wide, and fast), or will we wait for the government to fix it (whatever that means in an international arena, of course)?
One choice leads furtherance of the core values of an open, but secure, internet. The other may lead to a broken design, corruption, and a failing system that does nothing to help curb the problem, and may make it worse. I leave it to you (and the future) to decide which falls where...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Barking up the wrong tree, especially as those machines are already out there. Better would be to, say... have ISPs block all incoming requests to home accounts.
If spammers can't broadcast commands to their networks there'd be no use in having them. And blocking incoming requests also dramatically limits the number of computers to which a bot can "phone home" to GET commands, which in turn let's them target the command and control IPs.
Given the choice of blocking the occassional geek whose too cheap to spend $5 a month on a hosting service, vs. drastically cutting the amount of spam... well, I know which one I'd choose.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I keep bringing this up, time and time again.
It's not the people trying to sell the crap that are the real issue, its the middle-men who sell the dream of "internet marketing".
Moreover, I blame those "Work at Home, make Million$" ads you in magazines and on TV; these are essentially proxies for Internet marketing and the people who do well in those jobs turn to botnets and other illegitimate means. Meanwhile the parent marketing company can distances themselves from them, calling them "consultants" when people bitch about spam campaigns.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON