There might be a gang fight raging in your bedroom or study right now. There's no gunfire, no blood, and you won?t smell any smoke. But there is a battle. The fight is over your bandwidth and your PC processing power.
The war has escalated to a level where bot herders must jealously guard their hijacked computers. In October, a yet-to-be-named Russian gang released a program called SpamThru that infected machines worldwide and quickly amassed an army of zombies nearly 100,000 strong, capable of sending out 1 billion messages each day.
To protect the investment, the malicious program actually included a stolen copy of the Kaspersky antivirus program, modified to stop all attacks but its own. SpamThru installed the anti-virus program on all infected computers, removing all other viruses. It even sent an infection rate report to the program?s author. The stolen antivirus software continues to defend SpamThru bots from other attacks to this day.
By golly, Humpty, you're braver than I. I wouldn't go near such a site, nor the one in the other post which has trojan horses for sale. Gives me a vision of springs and wheels flying out of my computer, smoke, identity theft, >whew<.
Incredibly interesting read. Thanks Humpty!
Does anyone else find it completely hilarious that they used Kaspersky?
The story pretty much raised the hairs in my back. Even bots are troubled by other bots... fascinating.
The world has definitely gone mad.