Hackers Attack Campaign Monitor, Exploit Accounts for Sending Spam

Australia-based Campaign Monitor that develops e-mail marketing software cautioned its customers on August 11, 2009 about a hacking attack that had victimized the company during August 1-2, 2009, as reported by TheRegister on August 11, 2009.

Matthew Patterson, Website representative of Campaign Monitor, stated via a blog post that the intrusion had been a deliberate, well-organized and complicated attack. They were yet engaged in dealing with the hack together with mitigating its impact, as reported by Softpedia on August 11, 2009.

Telling more about the event, Campaign Monitor said that unidentified offenders hacked a weak computer server that had authentication and secure data stored on it.

The miscreants by carrying out the compromise were able to log in the e-mail accounts of consumers with the idea to use them for accessing e-mails. Miscreants used these e-mails addresses to send spam through the clean Internet Protocol status of the consumers' servers.

Thereafter, the traffic generated on account of the spamming operation resulted in slowing down of the company's e-mail operations.

Assessing the destruction on account of the spam campaigns, security specialists stated that the hack was either from a spammer who anticipated great benefits or from an unscrupulous contestant who worked extensively to bring the servers of Campaign Monitor on blacklist.

In the meantime, the company trying desperately to halt the outbound junk e-mails blacklisted several clients' e-mail accounts. Consequently, according to the company's officials, a few innocent users who were dispatching legitimate e-mail marketing messages possibly were inadvertently put on Campaign Monitor's blacklist. Hence, the company notified all of its clients who had their e-mails stolen or hacked over e-mail.

The incident brings to mind a similar case in which hacked e-mail accounts of a university were exploited to send spam messages in large quantities. Nevertheless, this technique of hacking e-mail accounts for launching spam campaigns is now in fashion as spammers are obsessed with efficacy that they have begun realizing via utilizing compromised or automatically registered new e-mail accounts that currently are responsible for nearly 20% of the total junk e-mails.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 9/1/2009