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Massive Spam Campaign Amazes Researchers
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-09-25
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
A bunch of junk messages hawking a variety of pharmaceuticals made the rounds on the Internet in April and May of 2006, and those were just the tip of a deep and dark iceberg of online crime.
Over 100 million messages flowed from a variety of locations during a fourteen day period. The scope of the zombie PC network compromised for this effort astonished researchers at email security provider Ironport: over 100,000 PCs hijacked in 119 countries, according to a BBC report.
In comparison, 192 nations are members of the United Nations.
To usher the messages past spam filters, Ironport found that the criminals included text from J.R.R. Tolkien's classic work, "The Hobbit," to fool filters into believing the spam emails were legitimate messages.
People who clicked on links were redirected to one of 1,500 domains operated by the spammers. These displayed phony storefronts for pharmaceutical firms. Patrick Peterson, chief technology officer of Ironport, described in the article where they proceeded with the investigation:
"They were trying to make it look as legitimate as possible," he said.
On some of the fake pharmacies, said Mr Peterson, the spammers had gone to the trouble of creating fake biographies for the supposed founders of the online shop. When an Ironport employee went to check the supposed real world location of one shop they found a vacant lot.
Using a one-time use credit card, Mr Peterson bought some pharmaceuticals from one of the web shops and was amazed when a package arrived in the post.
That package contained drugs shipped from a firm in India. Ironport sent the pharmaceuticals to a lab to determine what might be within them. Normally, such spam campaigns simply grab the credit card details and run, instead of fulfilling an order as this one did.
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Tag: Spam
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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