November 23, 2006

'Pump-and-Dump' Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders eWeek - The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan. What is new about this event is that this Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner—a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software—that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine.  9:06:29 AM