Spam News

Georgian conflict used to evade spam filters

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A spam email attack claiming that Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, is homosexual has been identified by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham(UAB).

It would appear that online spammers are now using the conflict in the European country as a way of circumventing virus detection software on PCs, Vnunet.com has reported.

A mass-spam attack was detected when the file was opened which resulted in more than 500 emails in a 90-minute period.

Gary Warner, director of computer forensics research at UAB, said: "The danger is that almost no antivirus products detected this virus when it began to be distributed this morning."

He went on to report that just four out of 36 anti-virus products which were tested revealed the suspicious file.

In other news, network security analyst Gadi Evron wrote in his blog that the recent web attacks against Georgian military website were most probably the work of rogue nationalists rather than criminal gangs as was previously believed.