Its the new tactic in infection warfare. Why bring down computers, when they can make you money?
Spam continues to rise, giving network administrators a headache trying to keep up with it.
CNET wrote an article about spam in 2004, stating that spam was about 38% of the 31 billion emails sent each day, up from 24% in 2002. This year, InformationWeek writes that by the end of the year over 90% of email will be spam. So given the improved antispam technology, where is all of this coming from?
Botnets.
And you may be participating without knowing it. A botnet is a distribution of zombies (or trojan/bot) that communicate with a designated server. Together they can consume massive amounts of bandwidth, but individually they're barely noticeable. For every one machine that is identified and cleaned, there will sure to be a few more to take its place.
Russian spammers recently deployed SpamThru, which downloads a pirated copy of Kaspersky AntiVirus and removes any competing malware. The botnet communicates with itself in a P2P fashion.
But not all spam is by email. One such infector is the Trojan.Mespam. This trojan drops rsvp32_2.dll amongst other files, then sends malicious URLs via Instant Messaging software and message boards.
http://www.antisource.com/article.php/mespam-trojan-rsvp32_2