News Latest email virus blamed on spammers

More on the Mimail outbreak from New Scientist:

The latest variant of a six-month old virus called Mimail appears to be being used as a double-pronged spammer's tool, says a victim of the attack, the anti-spam company Spamhaus. The virus is both forcing infected computers to attack anti-spam websites and harvesting email addresses.

Dave Linford, who runs Spamhaus, believes W32.Mimail.D embodies a worrying new trend, with spammers increasingly using computer viruses to increase the stealth and efficiency of their work.

"The spammers think computer viruses are the best thing since sliced bread," he told New Scientist. Previously, most virus writers were teenagers whose only aim was to create online havoc. Now computer viruses have moved into the hands of spammers with commercial aims, Linford says.

Paul Wood of MessageLabs, a UK-based spam and virus filtering service, thinks that a spam team is "definitely behind" the latest Mimail release. But Graham Cluley, of Sophos, another spam and virus filter company, is more cautious: "At this stage we can't say for sure that it is a spammer - it's almost too obvious."

Full report here

[KentBrockman]
Damn... You... SPAM!!!
[/KentBrockman]

 

Our London office is being hit by this virus, got over 10 emails all saying the same thing arrive, no way to know where they've come from. GRRRR!!!!

Luckily our mail server has virus protection, so we're only seeing the cleaned messages.