Well, this is bad news. It seems one of the biggest bugbears for open Wifi hot-spots, ‘what if it’s used to spam’, may now be happening on a wide scale…
Unauthorized WLAN Connections Used to Send Spam (2 April 2003)
Data gathered from a wireless LAN (WLAN) honeypot showed that nearly 75% of intentional unauthorized connections made were used to send spam. (newsfactor.com)
The honeypots were set up in the City of London for 2 weeks, as default, open WLANs. This is the nearest I can come to a source. Both RSA Security UK and Z/Yen don’t list it on their press releases pages.
My thoughts: it could be the Jeem or Rewt spam-relaying trojans searching for open nets automatically, from infected machines. Strikes me that there wouldn’t be too many spammers war-driving around London, in person.
Thanks to Tony Earnshaw for forwarding it on from SANS NewsBytes…
Date: 09 Apr 2003 19:57:32 +0200
From: Tony Earnshaw (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: SANS Newsbytes for today
SANS stuff is always interesting; those who care about their network and computer security should really subscribe – not to mention the SANS GIAC stuff.
The undermentioned is interesting to SA Talk.
— Unauthorized WLAN Connections Used to Send Spam (2 April 2003) Data gathered from a wireless LAN (WLAN) honeypot showed that nearly 75% of intentional unauthorized connections made were used to send spam.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21168.html
Tony
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Tony Earnshaw
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