A Weekend Filled With Spam

Like me, you probably spent the weekend fighting off spam. And strangely enough, most of it was in German. Did you find that odd?

Well, as ZDNet Australia reports, the reason is that the Sober.Q virus was spreading German hate mail all weekend. Apparently it was tied in to the 60th anniversery of the end of World War II.

But what’s really troubling here is that the Sober.Q virus was never distributed the way that most viruses are distributed—that is, by email. Instead, it was downloaded by computers already infected by the Sober.P virus. And, of course, those machines could have been used to download anything else.

I’m told that a fair number of the “phishing” and identity theft attacks are now coming from these ‘bots that are turning on the systems on which they are based. I wonder how long it will be until this threat is taken seriously—and something is done about it.

Looking at the mail headers of the spam, I saw that quite a few messages came from Comcast cable modems. I thought that they were blocking outgoing spam, but it looks like they’ve stopped—or, at least, the machines that were sending me email had not been blocked.