The spackers strike back
The BIG news last week was the attempt by Lycos Europe to create a screensaver called “Make Love Not Spam” that would hit the websites of spammers and increase their bandwidth costs. After three days of people saying “This is a really bad idea” Lycos Europe pulled it and formally ended it Friday.
Well, you knew there would have to be a response, right? Well, you were right. The spammers and their hacker allies (known collectively as “spackers”) have started their revenge.
The Register and C|NET are reporting that a new virus, dubbed “Mdropper-IT” is making the rounds in email. According to the articles:
Infected emails come in emails with subject lines such as “Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen” and an attachment called “Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip”.
According to F-Secure “the key-logging Trojan steals usernames, passwords, credit card details and e-mail addresses”. But isn’t that bad enough?
The unfortunate part is that there will be enough people out there who are frustrated enough by spam that they’ll open and install this Trojan without giving it a second thought.
And so those who are the most frustrated by spam will become those who eventually help to enable it.
MickC @ December 7, 2004