‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders

Slashdot pointed the way to an interesting article at eWeekM on the recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills. I’ve seen a huge spike on LISHost recently, and they says it’s due is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.

Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000+-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan. Think about that number for a second, 73,000…. In all, computers in 166 countries are part of the botnet, with the United States accounting for more than half of the infections.

They say With a botnet of this size, the group is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails in a single day.

November 18, 2006 by Uncategorized 1

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1 Response

  1. Curmudgeony says:
    November 21, 2006 at 3:30 am

    I read the words in the article…
    but they do not make sense.

    Tubes!

    Reply

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