Spammers target their nemesis with child porn hoax
Spammers target their nemesis with child porn hoax
Anti-spam campaigners have become the latest target for senders of malicious code, with virus experts of the opinion that the perpetrator is a spam email peddler seeking to cripple organisations that try to prevent them from sending the torrents of junk mail that end up in our inboxes every day.
The virus, codenamed W32.Mimail.E began infecting hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers worldwide. Like other Trojan worms before it, W32.Mimail.E is designed to install a malicious program (in this case "foo.exe") which rifles through the user's address books sending itself onwards to every email address it finds, whilst harvesting the addresses for the spammers who sent it, but there the similarities with previous Trojans worms end because W32.Mimail.E's job once installed, is to begin attacking the Spamhaus website, www.spamhaus.org, which names and shames spammers and campaigns to have them put out of commission and brought to justice for their actions.
Anti-spam organisations such as Spamhaus distribute lists of known spammers to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so they can automatically reject messages emanating from such sources.
In their efforts to curtail the good work of Spamhaus, the spammers have sunk to new a new low – by sending an email message to each user whose machine has been infected with the virus purporting to be from Spamhaus which says that if they do not send an email to a Spamhaus address they will be charged $22.95 on their credit card on a weekly basis. But the worst offence, and the one which has prompted millions of people to email complaints to Spamhaus, causing a massive distributed denial of service (dDoS) attack, is the sign off on the email which says a free pack of child porn CDs has been sent to the infected user's billing address.
"So many Internet users are flooding us with complaints about these child porn CDs that we supposedly ordered for them," said Steve Linford, founder of the Spamhaus Project. Spamhaus are currently working with police to try to identify those responsible.
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