Penny stock spam from the SpamThru Trojan
Russian hackers have been sending you lots of stock spam via a 73,000 computer peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.
Stewart said about 20 small investment and financial news sites have been breached for the express purpose of downloading user databases with e-mail addresses matched to names and other site registration data…
“They’re breaking into sites that are somewhat related to the stock market and stealing e-mail address from those databases. The thinking is, if they get an e-mail address for someone reading stock market and investment news, that’s a perfect target for these penny stock scams,” Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK.
And they are also sending you penis enlargement spam at the rate of over a billion per day:
“It’s a very enterprising operation and it’s interesting that they’re only doing pump-and-dump and penis enlargement spam. That’s probably because those are the most lucrative,” he added.
With a botnet of this size, the group is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails in a single day. “This number assumes one recipient per message, [but] in reality, most spams are delivered in a single message with multiple recipients at the same domain, so the actual number of separate spams landing in different inboxes could be even higher,” Stewart said.
