Spammers may be using viruses to attack their enemies. Further to my column on how virus writers and spammers may be in cahoots to deliver spam, The Register reports that anti-spam activists have produced fresh evidence that recent assaults — called Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS, — on their websites have been enabled by the infamous Sobig worm.Two anti-spam services, Monkeys.com and the Compu.Net “block list”, have already closed in the past week.
Spamhaus has been under constant “extremely heavy” DDoS attack since early July, and they believe the attack against his site and others originates from Windows machines infected with the Sobig worm, controlled by spammers over IRC networks.
What’s interesting is that, if properly investigated, this may help prove the link between (some) spammers and (some) virus writers. And, of course, get them off the streets and in jail.