German-language junk mail attacked my in-box!
this would explain all the mysterious german emails i've been receiving...
cut and pasted from Chicagotribune.com
May 16, 2005
Eric Zorn
WIE SAGT MAN AUF DEUTSCH “SPAM”?
German-language junk mail has attacked my in-box in the last few days, and Wired reports that I am far from alone:
E-mail users around the world got a rude awakening Thursday when a spammer flooded their inboxes with nationalist, borderline-racist propaganda in German....Some recipients reported receiving just a few messages, while others reported being overwhelmed by thousands of pieces of the spam....
But it wasn't the context of the messages that had some observers troubled. Rather, it was the method by which they were transmitted: through spam zombies.
Zombies are personal computers that have been infected with a virus that allows spammers to control them from a remote location for the purposes of sending out mass quantities of spam. These infected machines allow spammers to send much more e-mail than they could with their own e-mail server. It also makes it harder for authorities to trace the source of the messages....
Unfortunately for the unwilling recipients of such messages, tracking down the senders can be next to impossible. In addition to being able to hide behind spam zombies, the senders have another thing going for them: They're not leaving a money trail.
"Usually, you expect some punch line about which bank you can send your money to," said (one expert) "But there's nothing like that in these messages."...
In other words, unless technologists modify the underlying architecture of the Internet to prevent zombie attacks, political activists have at their disposal a perfect megaphone, one that can't be turned off.
It’s been scary, actually - I’ve had about 10 German rants an hour coming in, and it’s easy to imagine a determined zombie spammer hitting me and millions of others with 100 times that number of messages, bringing e-mail communications to a practical and technological halt.
cut and pasted from Chicagotribune.com
May 16, 2005
Eric Zorn
WIE SAGT MAN AUF DEUTSCH “SPAM”?
German-language junk mail has attacked my in-box in the last few days, and Wired reports that I am far from alone:
E-mail users around the world got a rude awakening Thursday when a spammer flooded their inboxes with nationalist, borderline-racist propaganda in German....Some recipients reported receiving just a few messages, while others reported being overwhelmed by thousands of pieces of the spam....
But it wasn't the context of the messages that had some observers troubled. Rather, it was the method by which they were transmitted: through spam zombies.
Zombies are personal computers that have been infected with a virus that allows spammers to control them from a remote location for the purposes of sending out mass quantities of spam. These infected machines allow spammers to send much more e-mail than they could with their own e-mail server. It also makes it harder for authorities to trace the source of the messages....
Unfortunately for the unwilling recipients of such messages, tracking down the senders can be next to impossible. In addition to being able to hide behind spam zombies, the senders have another thing going for them: They're not leaving a money trail.
"Usually, you expect some punch line about which bank you can send your money to," said (one expert) "But there's nothing like that in these messages."...
In other words, unless technologists modify the underlying architecture of the Internet to prevent zombie attacks, political activists have at their disposal a perfect megaphone, one that can't be turned off.
It’s been scary, actually - I’ve had about 10 German rants an hour coming in, and it’s easy to imagine a determined zombie spammer hitting me and millions of others with 100 times that number of messages, bringing e-mail communications to a practical and technological halt.