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Quote:It's not a comforting thought, but while you're sleeping peacefully, your PC may be hard at work acting as a spam server or peer-to-peer node, providing processing power to a malware network engaging in any of a variety of criminal activities online.

Spam is being used by botnet operators in a multiplicity of new forms -- such as those behind the now prolific Storm spam-malware hybrid -- to build distributed robot networks, or botnets, made up of spam recipients' enslaved "zombie" PCs. Taken together, the zombie armies provide raw processing power rivaling, and sometimes even surpassing, that of the most powerful supercomputers.

What's especially disturbing is that some legitimate businesses and regulatory and enforcement regimes are complicit, in that they make it more difficult than it needs to be curtail the problem.

"Spam is much bigger than the Storm worm,"...

Quote:Making use of infected .pdf attachments is only one of the file formats used in what has been a resurgence of Storm-driven spam during the first half of this year. Previously, a related wave of spam was spread across the Internet but it only included text messages luring recipients into pump-and-dump stock trading schemes.

"Spammers are utilizing common files types much more frequently, such as the .pdf issue over summer or the ZIP file attachments a few months ago as embedded ways to make the mail message look more authentic and bypass some detection tools," noted Troy Saxton-Getty, vice president and general manager at St. Bernard.

"Migrating from one format to another is as predictable as a shopper in a mall going from one store to the next," Randy Abrams, director of technical education for ESET, told the E-Commerce Times.

"Text, images, documents, spreadsheets, MP3s, etc. are all methods of communicating a message. Any file format that can be used to communicate a 'buy' message should be expected to be included in some form of spam...

Quote:"I believe that Web ad abuse will be a significant and growing attack vector. If Web sites want to meaningfully protect their reputations as well as their viewers I think they need to either block active content from advertisements or use expensive white-listing technologies," he suggested.

Abrams and other IT security professionals are advocating the adoption of much better approaches to establishing and verifying the reputations of Internet advertising agencies and specific advertising applets.

"This means that there also must be consequences to advertising agencies that provide malicious content, even inadvertently," Abrams said. "It is only then that there will be financial incentive to know who is providing the actual content, who is developing it, and how to physically find them."...