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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."
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.