Complexity in the spam world

The BBC News website has an article up about how spammers are getting more complex in how they send out spam, try and hide from anti-spam efforts, and actually sell their product. It is certainly a global effort.
From the article:

The sheer scale of the spamming operation became clearer when Mr Peterson started tracking where the spam was being sent from.

Analysis of the net addresses where the e-mail messages originated showed that more than 100,000 hijacked home computers spread across 119 nations had been used to dispatch the junk mail.

On interesting thing noted in the article was that, in this case the spam was for pharmaceutical products, the orders made on the websites were actually fulfilled and a product was shipped. Something that in the past was a rarity and instead you were just scammed out of money.
That said, the article does note that the drugs received were sent off for testing and the article didn't have any updates on those results.

Posted by Eric at September 25, 2006 09:39 AM | TrackBack