Subject: RE: [Asrg] What this?

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 20:04:13 -0700

Did you allow delivery of any of the mail to see what it was?

It could be spam or it could be some sort of virus or trojan
penetration attempt. The end objective here may not be spam,
it might be theft of credit card numbers or the like.

If it is spam it is almost certainly hardcore fraud, like the
bogus offers for hijacked software and the advance fee frauds.

There are a bunch of hacker tools that allow a hacker to control
a constellation of hacked machines as a single unit. These 
usually end up being used for criminal purposes.

>   Here's my theory.  Well-organized spam-gangs have compromised many
> thousands of personal computers all over the world.  They run 
> a central
> system somewhere that attempts to spam from one compromised 
> machine, and
> if one transmission attempt fails, they try from the next compromised
> machine, etc, until they manage to deliver (or run out of compromised
> machines).  It's a testament to the effectiveness of various 
> DNSbls that
> things have gotten to the point where spammers need to put forth this
> much effort to get past some people's filters.
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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:40:35 -0400

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 08:04:13PM -0700, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote
> usually end up being used for criminal purposes.

  I didn't see the logfile until after they stopped trying.  I'm an
end-user at clss.net.  They have end-user-configuarble blocking that
kicks in during the SMTP transaction.  I merely edit the blocking rules
in my filter file.

  My previous statements about trojaned machines had been conjecture on
my part.  Today I tripped over the following...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30414.html

Rise of the Spam Zombies
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus
Posted: 27/04/2003 at 09:56 GMT

  Pressed by increasingly effective anti-spam efforts, senders of
unsolicited commercial e-mail are resorting to outright criminality in
their efforts to conceal the source of their ill-sent missives, using
Trojan horses to turn the computers of innocent netizens into secret
spam zombies.

[...see above URL for rest of article...]

-- 
Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Email users are divided into two classes;
1) Those who have effective spam-blocking
2) Those who wish they did
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