Download SpamButcher's trial to experience nearly spam free email for 21-days without any risk or charge.

Spam Lets Yesterday's Virus Writers become Today's Fraudsters

Like in nature, most computer viruses have historically been harmless. There certainly been a few that have caused their share of grief - but as frequently the cause for alarm was their mere presence as opposed to them having a "payload" that would cause direct destruction of data.

While virus writers' behavior was certainly juvenile at best, most of them didn't seem hell-bent on wrecking the internet or exterminating massive amounts of data. This is surprising considering a lot of virus writers are kids. They tend to be smart kids, but kids who apparently lack more productive things to do. Most were satisfied with knowing code they wrote had spread itself throughout the planet.

In the last few years things have taken a substantial turn for the worse. It's now possible to make money writing viruses and worms that send out spam email.

Gray-market affiliates programs pay anyone who can sell products that are themselves gray-market. Yesterdays author of a mostly-benign virus now writes code programmatically turn thousands of computers into spam sending zombies. If all goes well, they'll end-up making a few percent of the profits generated.

These viral-spammers also tend to be smart. Since the affiliate programs often pay based on actual sales, they know it's in their interest to write code that dynamically generates messages designed to fool spam email blocker software.

By hijacking thousands of computers to send the spam email, it becomes possible to make DNS based blacklisting systems virtually useless to anti-spam filtering efforts. High-bandwidth costs normally associated with sending large amount of unwanted email become someone else's problem. Yes, this is also known as stealing services.

I almost always view free market economics as a good thing. This seems to be an exception.

Back