The Evolution of Spam, Part 1: New Tricks By Andrew Burger

November 13, 2007 -- It's not a comforting thought, but while you're sleeping peacefully, your PC may be hard at work acting as a spam server or peer-to-peer node, providing processing power to a malware network engaging in any of a variety of criminal activities online.

Spam is being used by botnet operators in a multiplicity of new forms -- such as those behind the now prolific Storm spam-malware hybrid -- to build distributed robot networks, or botnets, made up of spam recipients' enslaved "zombie" PCs. Taken together, the zombie armies provide raw processing power rivaling, and sometimes even surpassing, that of the most powerful supercomputers. Read more...