Storm Viagra spam generates £1.6m a year
Spam that's used to peddle drugs such as a Viagra through the Storm botnet is generating as much as £1.6m per year for hackers, according to researchers. The computer science department of the University of California carried out a study by infiltrating the Storm botnet, a robust peer-to-peer system that commands millions of hacked computers to send spam campaigns.
Researchers modified Storm's command-and-control system to insert their own links in spam messages that lead to websites they created instead of the one's spammers were advertising.
One of the websites advertised pharmaceuticals, and the other mimicked an e-postcard site. E-postcard spam often leads to websites that try to infect PCs with malicious software that causes the machines to send Storm-related spam.
