On Tuesday, Apr 1, 2003, at 05:27 Europe/London, Kee Hinckley wrote:
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.
The virus in question is (was?) Trojan.Win32.Rewt. A spam sending
trojan. But I don't expect we'll see many more of those - it's *very*
illegal to write a trojan - the feds *will* lock you up for it.
Especially in these times of heightened security everywhere. I'd be
very surprised if spammers went to these lengths.
Matt.
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