Saturday, 7. July 2007
Topic: SECURITY - on July 7, 2007 at 2:04:00 PM CEST
Trojan creates bogus webmail accounts to punt drugs
Miscreants have created a strain of malware capable of setting up bogus Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts in order to send spam.
The HotLan-A Trojan uses automatically-generated webmail accounts, suggesting that spammers have found a way to bypass the Captcha system (which typically means accounts can't be created until a user correctly identifies letters depicted in an image).
The Captcha system was set up by online service providers in order to try to ensure that only requests generated by a human, and not automated by a program, are serviced.
These challenge-response systems are often used to stop the automatic creation of webmail accounts by spammers, so their apparent defeat by the HotLan-A Trojan is of particular note.
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