Browser Security News

This botnet means business: A spam trojan in the wild is using pirated antivirus software to clean the bots it infects to ensure it has plenty of their CPU resources to send out its spam messages.

The so-called SpamThru trojan also uses other sophisticated techniques such as encrypting the spam message templates it sends to the bots as well as its own custom peer-to-peer protocol for communicating among botnet machines. Joe Stewart, the senior security researcher for SecureWorks who dissected the unusual trojan, says it appears to be backed by a well-financed and organized spam operation.

That theory rang true not long after Stewart went public with some of his findings: He found the spammers had locked him out of their botnet this morning. "I think the servers may have been taken down — all the template servers are no longer answering," he says. "I don’t have any evidence that the encryption key has changed, but it’s possible." Dark Reading - Desktop Security - Spammers Turn the Tables Again - Security News Analysis