swhx7
Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to Jameson
Good article, mixed up summary
Spam from botnets is nothing new, but there are some interesting new techniques used. It's a good article. There's a slideshow too.
The writeup above is somewhat confused.
botnets can be devastating, because of the way in which they may rapidly infect thousands of computers How rapidly computers are added to the botnet is independent of the harm that they do. In fact the article says little about how the member machines get infected initially. What's new here is how the botnet maintains its integrity against cleanup efforts.
, automatically forwarding the spam to other computers without the computer owners’ awareness. The Russian group has taken their botnet to the next level, using SpamThru Trojan and a built-in anti-virus scanner to ensure that the spam infects as many users as possible. This statement gets the function of the botnet mixed up with the question of how computers get infected. The particular botnets described are used to send spam, but spam is not necessarily the means of infection. In this case it's advertising stocks and bogus products.
The article doesn't go into the securtities aspect, but it should be pointed out that the companies whose stock is advertised don't necessarily have anything to do with these malware purveyors. The botmasters just pick some stocks that are big enough to make money on, but small enough so that spam respondents can move the price.
Another interesting aspect is that the spams used here are better at evading filters than most spams have been in the past. |
