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Quote:MessageLabs announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for October 2006. In this report, MessageLabs highlights the sudden increase in spam levels as spammers gear up to the holiday season, attributed to a huge rise in recent botnet activities and the latest outbreak of the Warezov virus, responsible for dropping an aggressive spam Trojan.

A spam-sending Trojan dubbed "SpamThru" is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru exploited numerous tactics to eliminate detection and enhance outreach such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection...

full article: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=4359

eWeek has an expose on the inner workings of the Russian spam botnet behind the SpamThru trojan

Quote:The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers...

Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.

According to Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at SecureWorks, in Atlanta, the gang functions with a level of sophistication rarely seen in the hacking underworld...

full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060235,00.asp