Why are you getting more SPAM

EVERYONE HATES SPAM.

Why are you getting more lately?

I don?t know if you have noticed but many of my customers have and want to know why.

The recent increase has been linked to a new ?Spam Bot??? (Trojan Virus) that has been
released in the past month called SpamThru. All of these machines are actually hooked together in what is called a ?bot network??? and this network is estimated at 73,000 infected clients. This means that all of these machines work in concert together to send out an estimate 1 Billion spam message a day.

According to data from Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor in Mountain View, Calif., there has been a 67 percent increase in overall spam volume and a 500 percent increase in image spam since Aug. 2006.

The new Virus is especially nasty in that it cleans yours machine in a sort of territorial war wiping out all other competing Virus? then it installs itself to take over your machine.

the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner?a pirated copy of Kaspersky’s security software– ?that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine. Once a Windows machine is infected, it becomes a peer in a peer-to-peer botnet controlled by a central server. If the control server is disabled by botnet hunters, the spammer simply has to control a single peer to retain control of
all the bots and send instructions on the location of a new control server.

The even bigger problem with this increase in spam is that the messages are getting past the filters at a much higher rate. This means that the spammers are getting smarter and way ahead of the spam filters and you are going to have to learn to deal with it or learn how to filter your mail better.

To understand more about this Virus, bot nets, and Spam see these articles at Eweek
‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders
Is the Botnet Battle Already Lost?