Spammers Promoting Child Porn Worldwide

Italian police warned on January 7, 2011 that spam mails, which though offered business opportunities while hitting Internet users' inboxes across nations, including Australia, in reality led recipients onto child abuse content. The Sydney Morning Herald published this in news on January 9, 2011.

Stated an officer named Elvira D'Amato at Italy's Postal and Communications Police that probed into the spam campaign, the business websites were not aware of whatever was happening as they weren't very big. Yahoo! News published this in news on January 9, 2011.

Currently, Hague (Holland) based Europol the law enforcement body of the European Union is coordinating the inquiry. Said Italian police that the investigation was started soon after an elderly woman purchasing items over the Internet in 2009 to gift to her grandchildren clicked through a web-page that though was hosted on an authentic business server, it actually showed child abuse content. The woman made a report of the problem.

Meanwhile, in the news that The Sydney Morning Herald published on January 9, 2011, D'Amato is quoted as saying that 20 Italian Web-surfers followed the web-links embedded on the spam messages as well as utilized credit cards for obtaining obscene pedophile material. All, as a result, had been charged, the officer indicated. Further, the malware infected some 100 websites in Italy, while a thousand more were contaminated across 30 other nations, including the United States, the majority of European countries, New Zealand and Australia.

Additionally D'Amato said that the spammers responsible for the campaign reportedly operated from Eastern Europe; however, the investigation was still going on via tracing the money.

On the whole, it was found that the spammers exploited genuine business sites for trading child porn thinking they would escape the highly strict police checks on the Internet. Stated D'Amato, the affected Italian websites included hotels and gyms, but they'd been sanitized of the infection.

Still, security specialists advise Internet users not to view the spam mails as also to not reply by answering them. What's more, they must load a firewall on their PCs to help stop any hacking attempt, the specialists add.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 1/20/2011