BiggAndyy the Magazine

In today’s report from Breitbart (linked to by Drudge) and in support of our previous discussion of Social Engineering Worms and Virii, there is a reported increase of “real time” worm infections from emails with titles like “Fidel Castro Dead” or “Hugo Chavez Dead”.

Whether or not this is the same strain of worm that has been dubbed “Storm Worm”, the pattern is clear. Current events are the newest horse the spammers and root kit worms are riding into your inbox and your System32 directory.

Happy99.exe and Melissa from the days of yore have revisited us again. Apparently we have not learned our lessons, or maybe just forgot them. But I suppose that this unending cavalcade of spam and worms will continue until the basic problem is corrected, the inherent shortcomings of the SMTP protocol, especially with regards to security and sender authentication.

Open Relays are no longer the problem they once were. Not because so many administrators put restrictions on open relaying but because the reason for exploiting an open relay is no longer a major hurdle to spammer and worm coders. Cheap broadband connections can allow a spammer to send nearly 1 million 5k emails from his computer in a day. But not content with that, the bot farms now in place send many magnitudes more junk per day.

For some more basic information see this brief but very informative treatment of the problem by Joseph Terrell at Rockriver.net.