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Spam Relays Found In Surprising Places
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-03-30
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Major tech companies and corporations with significant IT resources may have something extra on their networks: a spam relay pumping out millions of junk messages.
 | | Spam Relays Found In Surprising Places |  |
The plague of botnets, made up of compromised computers taking orders from a remote master, has been blamed for a lot of the spam being sent out by proxy. Sending spam this way conceals the path of the criminals orchestrating these mass mailing campaigns.
People would be surprised to know the things Brian Krebs found out for his Security Fix blog about this. Not all zombied computers are created equal, and not all of them are poorly secured home boxes running on a broadband connection.
Krebs noted the findings of data mining firm Support Intelligence. Their spam traps turned up some big brand names behind the IP addresses where junk has been tracked.
How big? How about Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, ExxonMobil, and Best Buy? How about 3M, the Post-It Notes people, revealed on the Support Intelligence blog as having pump and dump stock scams coming from a few of their IP addresses?
Pretty embarrassing circumstances, and ones that the forward-thinking security pro might think merit a straightforward apology along with quick action to remedy the relay. Best Buy took this route, telling Krebs they were "mortified" about the problem.
American Electric Power blamed a bot-infested machine belonging to a contractor for junk coming from their network. Their spokesperson said the contractor was allowed to use normally banned applications like web-based email, instant messaging, and "other communications tools."
(Helpful clue for AEP and whoever writes their contractor security policies: require your contractors to have their machines scanned for viruses, malware, and rootkits first before plugging them into your network. Also ensure the security services on their machines are up to date.)
Microsoft Acknowledges New Security Issue: The malformed ANI file issue with Internet Explorer that we cited yesterday has been officially confirmed by Microsoft. This problem stems from malicious animated cursor files used to exploit a vulnerability. Microsoft is investigating the issue.
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Tags: Spam Relay, Fortune 500, Microsoft, ANI
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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