Spammers Using Malware
Well, finally there is something the spammers are doing that might reduce the number of peolple responding to spam. Right now, if people stopped clicking links in spam emails, the profitablity of spam would go down and along with it the number of spam emails we would receive.
if no one was responding, they would not be making any money and would not continue to send out spam. So you. You know who you are. Stop responding to unsolicited email. You are clogging up the Internet and our email because you are dumb enough to keep clicking on those emails.
If you are not smart enough to use email, then at least set up an email account at gmail so most of it can be filtered for you.
Despite sophistication in ISP e-mail delivery policies and developments by malware services firms, this past year saw spam hit an all time high. According to spam detection services firm Symantec, which monitors more than 450 million inboxes worldwide, spam grew to more than 70% of overall e-mail traffic in 2007.
“There is a lot more money to be made on spam attacks, and spammers are getting more sophisticated,” he said. “Pump-and-dump stock scams — spam that encourages recipients to buy inflated penny stocks at cheap rates, after which spammers sell the stock to profit and then drop the value of the stock — are very profitable.”
As e-mail marketers themselves are embracing new technologies, so are criminals. According to malware detection firm IronPost, spam has become less focused on selling products and more focused on growing spam networks.
If you have ever clicked a link in a spam email, you may now have your computer being used as part of a spam network.
“Earlier versions of spam attacks were primarily selling some type of product such as pharmaceuticals or low interest mortgages,” said Jon Orbeton, strategic product marketing manager at IronPort. “Today’s spam includes an increasing amount of links that point to Web sites distributing malware. This malware is often designed to further extend the size and scale of the bot network that originated the spam in the first place.”
Botnet spam messages are sent out from a host computer, or zombie. These computers can host these botnets for months before being triggered to send spam, usually millions of messages in a very short period of time. This makes them difficult to track and shut down.
So it is not just attachments that you have to avoid anymore. A simple link in a spam email can send you to a website where a virus or malware awaits you. Please stop responding to spam email. get a gmail account, spam arrest or something. Ignore emails you did not sign up for and emails that are not even addressed to you in the first place.
