At 12:30 PM -0800 3/31/03, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
someone on list-managers just posted a note that has me a bit freaked.
she got spam addressed from a user of her mail list. That user seems
to have gotten "something" that caused her machine to send a spam
message to everyone in her address book.
I have heard people talk of viruses/trojans which either sent spam
directly, or used the user's account to signup for free accounts on
webmail sites and sent spam using those. But I've only heard those
in the friend-of-a-friend market.
There was an e-greetings trojan (technically it wasn't a trojan, it
was a test of how closely you read a EULA) which sent greeting card
messages to everyone in your address book. I've also heard that it
sent a copy of your address book to the company who set it up--but I
haven't seen that officially reported anywhere. (The fact that the
software did what it said it was going to do kind of threw the
anti-virus companies in a quandry. Some blocked it, some did not.
The company sending the stuff had to switch servers several times
too, since their ISP's weren't so friendly. Last I heard they had a
server in Panama.)
On the illegal fringes of spam I suspect that regular collaboration
of virus writers and spammers is only a matter of time. It's good
money for the script kiddies. Most likely I would expect the virus
not to carry the spam payload directly, but to pick it up from a
newsgroup or some such.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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