Botnets ramp up financial spam after McColo outage

January 11, 9:10 PMSF Financial Fraud ExaminerPaul Springer

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It all sounds bizarre, like a script from a suspense move. McColo . . . Botnets . . . Pushdo. The reality appears in just about everybody's e-mailbox everyday: annoying, idiotic, improbable spam.

Back around last Thanksgiving, inquiries by the Washington Post led to the shutting down of McColo, a San Jose-based ISP that provided ISP hosting to all manner of spammers. That's good news in that it stopped one of the biggest providers of services to botnets such as Rustock, Srizbi, Pushdo, and Mega-D.

Botnets facilitate spammers invading innocent people's computers and using them for nefarious purposes.

A recent article in InformationWeek's darkReading outlines plans of McColo rivals to exploit McColo's demise and roll out their own vile spam plans. A big part of the outlaws' fraudulent marketing scheme is financial fraud, including everything from corporate blackmail to investment offers to work-at-home-scams to Twitter tweaking. And a lot of newsletter counterfeiting, which means that images your spam filter recognizes as belonging legitimate publications may be part of a scam.

The long and short of it is that you may soon find your spam filters bombarded by all manner of stuff they may not be ready for.

So get get ready for a New Year's deluge of new spam. And remember . . . . like the devil himself, spam takes many forms!