Thanks Mr. Black and QuickReply for the heads up on this one. Spammers based in Russia are using stealth and a sophisticated new Trojan horse program to turn home workstations into unwitting hosts in a pornography and spam distribution ring, say security experts.
The deceptive and potentially illegal practice came to the attention of experts in late June and has been a topic of conversation among spam fighters on Internet discussion groups since then, says Joe Stewart, senior intrusion analyst with LURHQ, a Chicago-based managed security services company.
Someone sending out spam e-mail pointing to spoofed PayPal Web sites and Russian pornography sites appeared to be able to change the addresses of his sites every few minutes, says Richard Smith, an Internet security and privacy consultant based in Boston.
Smith stumbled on the problem in early July while investigating e-mail messages pointing to a phony PayPal site. It was being used to harvest personal financial information from customers of the online payment service.