Taking Spam to a new level October 26, 2006
Posted by Al in : clever,computers,software , trackbackI should imagine that you are all receiving the latest spam emails – the ones with the spam stuff in a graphic and then random sentences below that graphic. This works well to counteract spam filters, because if you keep flagging these as spam then the filters learn that an email with perfectly correct text (no spam keywords in their text these days) and a graphic is spam. This then means that you start to lose emails from friends and family as they have been flagged as Spam by the learning filters – as the situation continues users will come to distrust Spam filters, which is exactly what the Spammers want. However that has nothing on this latest ruse.
A new Trojan has been found operating in the wild, which does something that no other Trojan has done before. It actually installs it’s own Anti-Virus software and scans your system to remove any other viruses and spyware. This would be a nice thing if the motive was altruistic, however the purpose of this is to free up system resources so that the Trojan can forward spam without detection. Not only is this a first step in a new, and slightly weird direction, where we may soon have viruses and spyware actively fighting battles on our PCs; it also signifies a move by the Spammers into commercial grade code, which means that we’re soon going to be hit by some really serious viruses. Firewalls up, ladies and gentlemen – this is going to get ugly.
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