The stereotypical virus writer has always been a lonely hacker bent on causing maximum disruption. Lately, though, hackers seem to have teamed up with spammers, those twilight Internet advertisers who count on one sucker in a million to go for porn sites, penis-enlarging pills and various snake-oil products. Last week’s SoBig virus has convinced many security experts that viruses are the latest method of circumventing anti-spamming measures. “If you think about the motives of virus writers a year or two ago, it was all about recognition,” says Brian Czarny, marketing director at MessageLabs, an Internet security firm. “What’s the motivation today? It’s much different: there’s money involved.”
SoBig instructed each of the estimated 145,000 computers it infected to download software from one of 20 computers in the United States, Canada and South Korea. Because security officials intervened, we’ll probably never know for sure what was supposed to happen next (one system redirected computers to a porn site). Security experts, though, worry that similar viruses may already be infecting machines and using them as “proxies” to flood the Internet with spam.
Spammers need proxies because security experts are already on to the 200 or so outfits responsible for 90 percent of spam traffic in North America and Europe, says the London-based anti-spam organization Spamhaus. Three months ago, antivirus vendor Symantec began seeing viruses that were engineered to turn home or corporate computers into potential spam-relay points. Some of them have been thwarted, but many are still bouncing around the Net. MessageLabs, whose clients include the U.S. Federal Reserve and Dow Corning, has traced half of the spam its clients have received in recent months to virus-infected PCs. Spammers “are able to anonymously send out millions of e-mail messages, unbeknownst to the person who’s been infected with the virus,” says Czarny. “They’re able to basically cover their tracks.”
The short-term prognosis is a continuing rise in spam traffic–to 70 percent of Internet traffic in four months, up from 60 percent now, according to Spamhaus. After that, “if something isn’t done quite dramatically, the e-mail system will slowly grind to a halt,” warns Steve Linford, chief executive of Spamhaus. A massive and costly overhaul of the Internet e-mail system isn’t likely any time soon. For now, the best weapon may be the delete key.
