From Russia with spam
As I mentioned previously, we are all getting more spam these days. And many of these spams are penny stock rip-offs. A major source seems to be botnets run by Russian professional criminals. An article in eWeek gives a report on these gangs. It’s a sophisticated enterprise that is planting spam-spewing Trojans on the systems of many thousands of unsuspecting computer users. Here’s one wrinkle:
For starters, the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner—a pirated copy of Kaspersky’s security software—that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine. Once a Windows machine is infected, it becomes a peer in a peer-to-peer botnet controlled by a central server. If the control server is disabled by botnet hunters, the spammer simply has to control a single peer to retain control of all the bots and send instructions on the location of a new control server.
Not only are these crooks planting Trojans, but they are also breaking into places where they can steal the email adddresses of some likely victims.
…They’re breaking into sites that are somewhat related to the stock market and stealing e-mail address from those databases. The thinking is, if they get an e-mail address for someone reading stock market and investment news, that’s a perfect target for these penny stock scams…
The eWeek article and links that it contains detail a sobering story of how professional criminals (very often outside the US) are operating a variety of Internet scams. So far the crooks are winning the battle. One eWeek article asks Is the Botnet Battle Already Lost?
Unfortunately, the crooks have a big ally on their side- human greed and stupidity.
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