SPAM is a huge money earning business, both for the companies using it to sell products, and the companies selling products to stop it.
One of the worries of the spammer is getting caught and being prosecuted. This has been made more of a problem by new laws in many parts of the world outlawing unsolicited commercial email, though this doesn’t just relate to normal spammers, virus writers and phishing scammers use the same techniques to avoid the authorities and they are even more invasive and illegal activities.
In an effort to continue their nefarious activities, while lessoning the risks, the spammers are starting to merge or make deals with proponents of other, even worse online activities, such as cracking and virus writing. The latest trend is to use a world wide network of hacked or virus infected PC’s most of which are running one of the many recent Windows virus’s that installs a back-door into the PC (unbeknownst to their owners) to host websites that are nearly untraceable by conventional means.
It is ironic that distributed computing, once known mostly for noble projects like SETI and mapping the human genome, has been turned into a method to hide criminals from the authorities. What the crims now have is a huge network of compromised PC’s that when running special software (installed via the virus back-door) that has the ability to distribute the phishers or spammers content pages over so many PC’s that to actually find the criminals in question becomes nearly impossible.
You can read the full story over at Wired.
Regards
Franki
