Alright, I’ll fess up: spam has never been just for email, in spite of our cluttered inboxes that loudly protest to the contrary. Spam’s early commercial origins point back to a message to 6,000 recipients on Usenet by a couple of immigration attorneys named Canter & Siegel from Phoenix, Arizona back in 1994 who were promoting their services to enroll people in the national green card lottery. From these roots, spam moved on to its dominant format today: email. Nonetheless, the flood of SMTP-based spam we see today may obscure the other flavors of spam that have popped up, including IM spam, SMS spam, and the Web 2.0 buzzword-friendly “splog”.
I’ll spare you all the gory details on IM and SMS spam, they’re pretty straightforward. IM spam has yet to reach major proportions, but it’s certainly out there, plugging spy software, ringtones, and other services. SMS spam has been highly visible overseas since 2001, especially in Asia where SMS has been used heavily for some...
We’re happy to report that so far today, Peacomm and Mixor.Q activity is lighter than the maelstrom of activity we’ve seen in previous days. We’ve noted no new spam runs today, with the malware submissions and activity levels tapering off a bit as well. Phew! Our Security Response team in Pune, India, has pulled together a slick Flash-based run through of the attack, which can be viewed using the following URL: http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/home_homeoffice/media/flash/peacomm.html
Just a little more info on this threat you may have not heard before—it is communicating over peer-to-peer using the Overnet protocol and network (of eDonkey fame). After connecting to the network, the threat then searches for some particular hashes (searches are done by hash, not by specific filename) and eventually it receives a reply that includes some 'meta tag' information...
