A Look Into How Spammers Spam

from the zombie-machines:-the-choice-of-a-new-generation dept

Nothing all that surprising here, but some anti-spammers have managed to get themselves into the various “spam clubs” where top spammers trade tips with each other. From that they’ve learned, as we all pretty much knew already, that the state of the art in spamming is using compromised machines that have had a trojan installed on them. Lists of such controllable machines are offered to other spammers, both for additional spamming capabilities and for denial of service attacks. Basically, the spammers have built up quite a distributed super computer – and those contributing cycles and bandwidth don’t even know about it.


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Comments on “A Look Into How Spammers Spam”

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5 Comments
Oliver Wendell Jones (profile) says:

But...

Although it hurts my brain to do so, I can twist my perspective just enough to see how some deranged individuals could consider what they do to be semi-legitimate marketing, but…

If you have to make use of compromised PCs that don’t belong to you and use up bandwidth that someone else is paying for, how do they justify that to themselves? Or don’t they even care?

thecaptain says:

Re: But...

There’s not a spammer in the world who believes his methods are legitimate.

You nailed…they have to resort to a crime (yes, in most countries, using/accessing a compromised PC is a crime)

When can we start making SPAM a crime? Anyone caught using these methods should face hefty jail time.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: But...

yes,
the prison system is not full enough and we must put this hideous transgression behind bars.
Not only can I waste time deleting their crap, I can spend my tax dollars keeping them in jail.

spam is a nuisance but it hardly constitutes a crime. Using compromised computers already falls under the category of fraud & misappropriating equipment, which is already a crime.

More laws don’t work ‘captn

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