Spammers may be using viruses to attack their enemies. Further to my column on how virus writers and spammers may be in cahoots to deliver spam,
The Register reports that anti-spam activists have produced fresh evidence that recent assaults — called Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS, — on their websites have been enabled by the infamous Sobig worm.
Two anti-spam services, Monkeys.com and the Compu.Net “block list”, have already closed in the past week.
Spamhaus has been under constant “extremely heavy” DDoS attack since early July, and they believe the attack against his site and others originates from Windows machines infected with the Sobig worm, controlled by spammers over IRC networks.
What’s interesting is that, if properly investigated, this may help prove the link between (some) spammers and (some) virus writers. And, of course, get them off the streets and in jail.
Riding on the success of Apple’s iTunes, Musicmatch has announced its own digital song-selling business, according to CNET. The service has access to songs from five major labels and more than 30 independents, with pricing set at 99 cents per song and $9.99 for most albums.
A wonderful innovation with Opera’s browser was the mouse gesture, where you could, for example, return to a previous page by holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse a little to the left. Intuitive and seriously time-saving. Now Internet Explorers have the same feature, courtesy of a bit of freeware (software you don’t have to pay for) from UnH Solutions.
Seems like the IM wars aren’t over yet. Further to my postings about Yahoo and Microsoft Messenger apparently blocking third party chat aggregators like Trillian, seems the latter’s patches don’t seem to be enough to keep folk connected. CNET reports that Yahoo has begun blocking Cerulean Studios’ Trillian software from communicating with its own instant messaging software as part of its plan to limit third parties from piggybacking on its service.
Another Blaster suspect has been arrested. Prosecutors refused to release any information about the suspect, not even the youth’s gender or home state, AP reported. The variant the juvenile allegedly created was known as “RPCSDBOT.”