November 20, 2006
The art of spam
Looks like we’re not the only ones who have noticed the big pickup in penny stock spam making it through our spam blockers.
Via Venture Chronicles, Eweek says security experts have traced some of the spam back to a sophisticated gang of Russian hackers running a network of 70,000 zombie computers. The network, known as a ‘botnet’, is capable of sending up to a billion spam messages a day. Apparently, the ‘bot herders’ who control the network have been harvesting email addresses from "about 20 small investment and financial news sites" in order to better target their ‘pump and dump’ stock scams.
Meanwhile, Mikko Hyppönen and his team at F-Secure have been connecting the dots on Warezov, a mass-emailing worm it says is responsible for the recent pickup in Viagra spam. This scam, which sends emails that link to fake pharmacy sites, is being run out of China.
Earlier this month, Paul Taylor wrote in the FT about the spam "tsunami" that is threatening corporate computer networks:
Based on an analysis of almost 70bn e-mails sent between September and November, there was a 59 per cent rise in spam over the period and the onslaught is continuing, according to Postini, the e-mail message management company.
Unwanted e-mail represents 91 per cent of all e-mail and the daily volume of spam has risen by 120 per cent over the past 12 months.
It’s easy to get depressed about this huge influx of spam. Fortunately, someone has found a use for it. Spamland, from the Brothers McLeod, is an art project that dramatises the semisensical text that image spammers use to get around spam blockers. Their first installment came out a few weeks ago. You can watch it on YouTube here.
