Next-gen botnet armies fill spam void

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Anonymous Coward

'massive networks of infected Windows machines' #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 00:02 GMT

Says it all really.

Mines the one with a well designed OS in the pocket

Anonymous Coward

solution #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 00:58 GMT

Anyone that buys anything from a spam mail should be banned from computers, teaching and, breeding.

Anyone who enters details into a site linked from spam/scam mail should be banned from computers, teaching and, breeding.

I know it's harsh, however our office mail gets 90,000 spam mails and 2000 legit mails in a 28 day period (the joys of having a mail domain that's been around for 9 years.)

Eventually with no idiots to buy junk or fall for the fraud from spam the spammers will move on to something more devious but slightly less messy and irritating.

As to infected windows machines, of course they are, their the most common desktop systemm operated by joe average so they're the most complicated for attacks that depend on users being unprepared for attacks.

*ix boxes tend to be the target of more complex and focused attacks against specific targets but when operated by the normal linux user are only marginally more secure then a windows box. If every tom dick and harry had linux installed then you'd see massive networks of linux infected machines.

Moss Icely Spaceport

Someone should tell the Government #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

That spammers are peddling kiddie nasties!

That will get some action and cash from them!!!

Tommy Pock

Just to put a stop to that #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

Before it starts http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/06/linux_vs_windows_viruses/

Steve

@AC #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

"Mines the one with a well designed OS in the pocket"

This'll be the one that the average Joe can't actually use?

I assume your one of the people also slating Vista for introducing UAC too?

Stop it Steve, don't feel the trolls...

Anonymous Coward

"the ability to upload the Windows minidump crash dump file to a control server" #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

Doesn't that make it easier to identify the control server, and find out where those crash dumps are going?

Time to start building some bigger prisons, methinks.

Anonymous Coward

infected Windows machines #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

Please stop redundancy, you're wasting precious bytes.

Stu Reeves

The stoopid thing is.... #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:58 GMT

....many ISP's in the UK give A/V and Firewalls away free, but most people choose not to install them!

I'd make it compulsory if I was an ISP, to have up to date a/v and firewall. It's not like there are no free ones out there!

that would stop a HUUUUGGGEEE amount of this crap out there.

druck

@Stu Reeves #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 11:27 GMT

"I'd make it compulsory if I was an ISP, to have up to date a/v and firewall"

As long as that's only for Windows users, and the ISP doesn't discriminate against OS's which have no need for such parasitic security afterthoughts.

Evil Auditor

"I'm a little filthy, I'm a filthy little bot..." #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 11:33 GMT

That's why my internet surf pc has no hard drive and starts from a CD. (not really, I was just too lazy to replace the broken HD but it works well)

Adrian

@By Moss Icely Spaceport #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 11:33 GMT

Even better:

Tell them they are terrorist spammers peddling global warming kiddie porn.

But knowing the government they would introduce some knee-jerk crap legislation..

Lionel Baden

@ tommy pock #

Posted Friday 16th January 2009 10:51 GMT

Well actually with the popularity of apple devices rising (not so much computers) we have already seen viruses been written to include them as well

So as for your argument in the other link

Meh

I understand bill is a good scapegoat (hell i use him too).

Anonymous Coward

Spam was down, now back up and using odd charsets #

Posted Friday 16th January 2009 11:32 GMT

Hmm the amount of spam I get did go down but now it's back up again and it's using UTF-8 encoded UTF-16 titles, like I can't tell those, I've just written a text translator that does just exactly that..

I mean why can't ISP's e-mail or contact in some other way people who's machine appear to be botnets and say "We've noticed a sudden rise in the amount of e-mail traffic".

Or how about blocking any e-mail being sent that's could be a forged address.

i.e myspamaddress@geoff.com when they've not sent one from there - okay would need some checking.. but since "web mail" based stuff all goes via http they'll probably switch to that...

A half decent filter would work as well.

Anon as well - I hate them all..