Spammers and phishers have responded to increased law enforcement by launching a program of terrorism.
Spam Terrorists are aiming to take down the Domain Name System. As eWeek notes, they send out floods of e-mail from domains that don't exist, register them that morning, then close them by evening.
Anti-spam programs and systems all check e-mail against the DNS to see if it's spam. The terrorists' aim is nothing less than the destruction of the DNS and the anti-spam action.
Phishers have taken to terrorizing users, mass-mailing trojans that log your input when you're on your banking site, then send that data to the terrorists.
Maybe if we call this what it is -- terrorism -- loudly and long enough, something will be done about it. We're supposed to be at war with terrorism, but I don't see anyone going after the Internet terrorists with anything like the priority it deserves.
UPDATE: The human excrement who created the WmvDownloader.a and WmvDownloader.b trojans need to be spending the rest of their natural lives behind bars.
Terrorists? Suspicions are being raised in some quarters that it is the recording industry itself that are acting like terrorists. WmvDownloader.a and variants seem to be nuisances that flood infected pcs with Adware, spyware and diallers. Mainly trying to trash pcs that are involved in swapping wmv movie files on P2P networks like KaZaA or eMule. Up-to-date antivirus should protect you.
See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/13/drm_trojan/
Quote:
The video files infected by these Trojans have a .wmv extension and are protected by licenses, supposedly issued by the companies overpeer (in the case of WmvDownloader-A) or protected media (for WmvDownloader-B), Panda reports. Overpeer was previously hired by the recording industry to dump fake versions of songs on file sharing networks. Later it lobbed pop-ups and adware at users. Loudeye - overpeer's parent company - told PC World last December that P2P users are getting what they deserve.
Whether overpeer has begun using more aggressive tactics is unclear, the evidence against it is circumstantial and it could be other parties have used its name as a convenient smokescreen.
End quote.
Nice people, eh?
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