3 Gangs Behind Spam Barrage

Three small online crooks' gangs are suspected to have caused the barrage of spam that created chaos with email systems in these countries last year, as per an anti-spam expert.

The technology vice-president for US anti-spam company Ironport, Mr. Pat Peterson said that the worldwide use of spam emails that stopped many of the New Zealand's ISP customers from receiving or sending emails was caused due to the modification of the so-called "image spam", which attaches an e-mail's message as an image, as per the reports of Stuff.co.nz on May 28, 2007. As these contain no hyperlinks or text and come with useless English text, they are difficult to detect and consequently confuse spam filters.

Then a different kind of Stration worm came up which captured a person's PC to dispatch many messages. This spread a Trojan dubbed "Spam thru", but Stration is not widespread and is a low-risk infection. It is a tough worm and the anti-virus companies are having a hard time in keeping track of it and combating it.

In the past few years, it has morphed into several forms. It has also been called as "Warezov" and "Stratio".

By scattering tiny random dots throughout the spam images, the Trojan on each PC was, successful in changing the spam images. This made every email look different to spam-filters, but didn't change the image to a human eye.

Coupled with this novel technology, a few financial phishers- Mr. Peterson believes that there are 3 groups or possibly just one- who are using these kind of technique to build up an array of global spam campaigns asking people to purchase particular penny stocks.

The number of spam images reached a colossal 24 billion a day, which is equal to 30% of the worldwide total.

In 2006, spam filters were preventing the image spam by mathematically analyzing the images and stopping them when they received large numbers of similar ones.

Peterson expects that once the gangs discover a new method to escape from the filters, they will launch another spam deluge.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 6/6/2007