Proxy Spam Gangs

A new breed of online service provider has popped up due to the demand of spam senders.

Worms such as sobig leave compromised PC's open for use by spammers. Many of the PC's are reconfigured as "open proxies" that will relay any commands sent to them to other computers. These open proxies are also referred to as zombie systems.

Proxy spam gangs peddle lists of these cracked PC's, and frequently the software required to exploit them. Distributing the sending of spam across thousands of PC's helps foil many server-based efforts to block junk e-mail.

Some provide a one-stop solution. They provide the list of target email addresses, compromised computers and the software needed to blast out the junk emails. Often the authors are based over sees and charge low prices for their goods. $50 goes a long ways in Russia.

SpamButcher is available as a free spam filter download from www.spambutcher.com.

The legality of this software seems to fall into a gray area. Having lock-picking tools, and a list of houses that are easily broken into may or may not be a crime itself.

Most victims never know that there systems are being used to send massive numbers of spam messages. Their systems may get slower, but they generally continue working. It's not in the junk email sender's interest to totally shut the user down.

Spam attacks launched from thousands of different systems are much harder to prevent using anti-spam email blacklists. Content filtering such as this spam filter uses is less effected by the network or server the spam is sent from.

To protect your inbox from time wasting junk messages, consider using a program to prevent spam email such as SpamButcher.

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