PC Stripper Spam
October 31, 2007 | by Christopher Nickson
Spammers create stripper game to grab Captchas.
The spammers keep becoming more inventive. They know they can’t automate a program to get Captchas, the misshapen word that guards a site and has to be retyped to make sure it’s a human on the other side of the screen. But they want access to the sites that have them.
The solution? Get someone to do the work for you. How to do it? According to a BBC report, it’s the eternal lure of sex. Spam e-mails by someone claiming to be “Melissa” offer to show an image in gradual states of undress in return for unscrambling a series of Captchas.
This new idea has been spotted by Trend Micro, who say that all the Captchas they’ve observed so far are for Yahoo Webmail.
“The free e-mail services, so far, have been extremely successful at using Captchas to recognise a human being or an automatic program," said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.
The Captcha, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, has proved to be an effective deterrent, and so far there seem to have been few takers on this tease.
Genes told the BBC that the spam program only arrives on machines infected with malware, coming alive when the user brings up Internet Explorer. If you have Vista, you’re safe, since the stripper program works on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003.
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