posted on May, 20 2003 @ 11:27 AM
In the last two years, more than 200,000 computers worldwide have been hijacked without the owners' knowledge and are currently being used to forward
spam, according to AOL and other Internet service providers. And each day thousands of additional PC's are compromised at companies, institutions and
� most commonly of all � homes with high-speed Internet connections shared by two or more computers.
"The spammers have mutated their techniques," said Ronald F. Guilmette, a computer consultant in Roseville, Calif., who has developed a list of
computers that are forwarding spam. "Today, if you are trying to do a really mass spamming, it is de rigueur to do it in an underhanded manner."
Just last Thursday, 17 law enforcement agencies and the Federal Trade Commission issued a public warning about some of the ways spammers now
commandeer computers to evade detection. The officials translated the warning into 11 languages because many of the exploited computers are known to
be in China, South Korea, Japan and other countries with heavy Internet use.
Mostly, the spammers are exploiting security holes in existing software, but increasingly they are covertly installing e-mail forwarding software,
much like a computer virus. For some, hacking is no longer about pranks, but making a profit.
In the last six months, an increasingly common trick has been for spammers to attach rogue e-mail-forwarding software to other e-mail messages or hide
it in files that are meant to emulate songs on music sharing sites like KaZaA.
As with all such hacker contraptions, and much spam, it is difficult to figure out who is behind these programs. But there is some evidence that one
of the major spam-sending programs, known as Jeem, originated in Russia, which has been a fertile ground for both spammers and hackers.