Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

Fri Oct 10 01:47:20 UTC 2003

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 05:20:10PM -0700, Margie Arbon wrote:
> 
> --On Thursday, October 09, 2003 7:54 PM -0400 Susan Harris 
> <srh at merit.edu> wrote:
> 
> >
> >Folks, let's move this discussion onto one of the many lists that
> >focuses on spam:
> >
> >  http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/spam-l.html -- spam-l list
> >for        spam prevention and discussion
> >  http://www.abuse.net/spamtools.html -- spam tools list for
> >software        tools that detect spam
> >  net.admin.net-abuse.email | net.admin.net-abuse.usenet -- usenet
> >lists
> >
> 
> I am curious as to why open proxies, compromised hosts, trojans and 
> routing games are not considered operational issues simply because 
> the vehicle being discussed is spam.
> 
> With all due respect, we have a *problem*. End user machines on 
> broadband connections are being misconfigured and/or compromised in 
> frightening numbers.  These machines are being used for everything 
> from IRC flooder to spam engines, to DNS servers to massive DDoS 
> infrastructure. If the ability of a teenager to launch a gb/s DDoS, 
> or of someone DoSing mailservers off the internet with a trojan that 
> contains a spam engine is not operational, perhaps it's just me 
> that's confused.

I think that in the case of spam, it is not some teenager, but rather
adult, vicious, sociopathic criminals. They are not fooling around, folks.

-- 
-=[L]=-