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Report on Spammers| Category | | | Summary | | Spammers can range from high school students trying to make some extra bucks, to lazy forty-year old men looking for easy money. There is a belief that due to recent legislation, spamming may become a process run by organized crime. |
| | Body | Let's begin with two basic questions:
1) Who are they?
Spammers can range from high school students trying to make some extra bucks, to lazy forty-year old men looking for easy money. There is a belief that due to recent legislation, spamming may become a process run by organized crime.
2) Why do they do it?
The thing with spamming is that it is incredibly profitable. As long as people continue to click on links, and purchase products, spamming will continue. Spammers are paid on commission, which creates a system of massive emailing in order to realize a maximum profit.
3) How is it done?
There are two main types of spammers; the amateurs and the professionals who in it for the real money. Let's begin with the amateur attempts at "email marketing" (the fancy term for spam).
[block]Amateurs:
A person starts by searching Google for a website that pays commission for each item sold through their personal reference link. The question now becomes: How do I get the maximum amount of people to purchase my product? The answer is email. The first thing they get a
hold of is a massive email sender, which is able to connect to POP3 mail
accounts. They subsequently send the same message to thousands of email addresses by using a list. Most amateurs will tend to search the web only for free POP3 mail accounts, which in turn explains the large drop in the number of free POP3 mail accounts).
Professionals:
These are the people who account for 90% of the unsolicited email that you receive in your email accounts every day, and they tend to be experienced programmers. Much like small-time spammers do, they might use reference links, but the majority tend to set up their own sites hosted in foreign countries. This also leads to the problem of identity theft (which will not be covered in this report).[/block]
How they send out the email, however, is on a much higher technical scale than the amateurs. Most professionals will scan for a mis-configured SMTP (mail) server. This is the biggest difference between
the two groups. At this point it is literally impossible to track down the
spammer, compared to the other way which can leave traces of your IP lying around if done incorrectly.
Another method of sending out spam mail is using zombies, which are computers infected with trojans. These trojans are usually sent out through P2P (perr-to-peer) file-sharing services such as Kazaa. Sometimes they are preloaded with email lists, but they tend to search the infected computer for programs such as Outlook Express, sending their messages using the host machine's address book. With the release of Phatbot, CDC's (Cult of the Dead Cow) Phatbot3, and
other similar programs, zombie computers have increased to an overwheming degree.
Other trojans are still used, but with the incredible spreading capabilities of the Phatbots, they tend to be the most popular, and the
least detected.
Prevention:
Now that we have discussed how it's done, lets move on to securing your computer(s).
Home Users:
1.) NO KAZAA, NO WINMX, NO P2P Software.
2.) Along with your firewall and antivirus program, you might want to look for an anti-Trojan program; I personally use The Cleaner.
3.) Keep your computers updated with security patches from Windows, and new definitions from your antivirus provider. If you don't update, you might as well not even install the software.
4.) Never click download links in e-mails you receive from anyone, even if they are from someone you know. All major worms and trojans tend to spread over the Internet this way. Send a reply to the sender to authenticate the attachment or download link that was sent to you. |
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: Doeycall)
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