Anti-spam group issues junk mail warning
7 February 2005
Anti-spam group Spamhaus has warned web users that the amount of spam in circulation could increase massively because of a new virus that hides the origins of junk mail.
Infected computers are used by the virus to get at an ISP's own email servers, rather than using the infected machine itself to send out emails. The program also makes spam look as though it has been sent by legitimate mail servers, making it harder to filter out.
Online security experts are calling on internet service providers (ISPs) to ramp up their security in order to deal with the threat.
Steve Linford, Spamhaus Project founder, said: "It is very, very serious [but] it isn't going to collapse the Internet today or anything. But it is very serious and causing a very large surge in spam. Obviously there are ways to attack it with additional filters and things like that, but it is something that's going to be quite difficult to tackle.
"The problem is that if ISPs don't tackle it, then by mid-2006 we're going to have the spam levels at 95 per cent of all emails, which is going to cause failures to occur all over the place."
The Spamhaus Project maintains a database of IP addresses that are responsible for sending spam and the lists are then used by ISPs to block spam from their customers.
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