You know, in real terms, the spammers and malware guys are costing the U.S. more than the 9/11 hijackers.  If we’re willing to spend a trillion dollars and bomb countries that really had nothing to do with these attacks, can’t we spare maybe one SEAL team to go to Moscow, Macao and Bangalore to shoot these people in the head?  Or maybe just launch a couple of cruise missiles, targeted on the server farms of the spammers, coordinated with a draining of all monies from their bank accounts? 

You want to re-build American prestige and power around the globe? Hang some spammer skins from the barn door. 

This latest attack
is utterly fiendish, and reflects the efforts of a sophisticated criminal enterprise.  Viz:

The Trojan, named “Storm Worm” by antivirus vendor F-Secure, first started to spread
on Friday as extreme storms engulfed Europe. The e-mail claimed to
include breaking news about the weather, in an attempt to get people to
download an executable file.

Over the weekend there were six subsequent waves of the attack,
with each e-mail attempting to lure users into downloading an
executable by promising a topical news story. There were e-mails that
purported to carry news of an as-yet-unconfirmed missile test by the
Chinese against one of its weather satellites, and e-mails reporting
that Fidel Castro had died.

Each new wave of e-mails carried different versions of the
Trojan horse, according to F-Secure. Each version also contained the
capability to be updated, in an attempt to stay ahead of antivirus
vendors.

Of course, the worm is designed to turn the dimwit home computer users’ machines into zombie botnets, so that they can then send out even more shit about worthless penny stocks and bogus V1@gr@ … christ! NBC news even woke up to this – perhaps someone over at the Microsoft side nudged his snoozing NBC compatriot and clued them in as to what’s actually happening on the net.

The lost productivity and the clogging of “teh pipes of teh internets” is monumental already. Once these crooks have seeded and harvested their botnetworks, it will only get worse.


The recent trend has been toward highly targeted attacks on individual
institutions. Mail services vendor MessageLabs said that this current
malicious campaign was “very aggressive,” and said that the gang
responsible was probably a new entrant to the scene, hoping to make its
mark.

None of the anti-malware companies interviewed said they knew
who was responsible for the attacks, or where they had been launched
from.

…maybe I’m just fed up with the amount of spam showing up in my various inboxes the last week or so, but liquidating these cretins sounds like a really good idea right about now. Well, at least as good (if not better) an idea as any of the other pre-emptive strikes we’ve indulged in lately out of nothing more than pique…

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