New Gang of Spammers Attempt to Rival Storm Botnet for Power

A copycat spam gang has developed a botnet that is currently responsible for more than 20 per cent of all spam in circulation the threat research TRACE Team announced Wednesday. According to e-mail and Internet security company Marshal, the botnet now has the ability to distribute similar amounts of spam as the notorious Storm botnet. The spammers responsible for this botnet have been touted the "Celebrity Spam Gang," owing to their fondness for using celebrity names in their spam.

According to Marshal, the Celebrity Gang has been building up their botnet since August 2006. They have managed this by spamming out messages with malware attachments that commonly feature subject lines about nude celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears but have also promised free games and Windows Security Updates.

"The gang now controls a sizable botnet that generates significant volumes of spam -- enough to put them right up there with the current kings of spam, the Storm Gang. We consider them 'copycats' because they have followed the Storm Gang's approach of spamming out malware in order to expand their botnet and in turn build the capacity to generate greater numbers of spam messages," said Bradley Anstis, VP of Products for Marshal.

"The Celebrity Spam Gang is using a common but proven means of social engineering to fool e-mail recipients into infecting themselves with the botware. They are emulating the Storm Gang but using arguably less sophisticated methods. It is a concern to us that so many computer users are still being taken in by what we would consider to be an obvious subterfuge as 'check out this nude Britney Spears game.' The Storm Gang has been more inventive with their campaigns and exploited everything from news headlines to greeting cards. There is clearly a need for renewed awareness and education," said Anstis. 

"The Celebrity Spam Gang has been on our radar for a while but it was not until now that we realized the scale they have achieved with their botnet. We deliberately infected a test computer with the Celebrity Gang botnet and then closely monitored its behavior and the make-up of spam it was instructed to send by the spammers. We were able to match this spam against 23 percent of all spam we saw in circulation for the previous month. It was a little bit of a surprise to learn how significant a spam player they had become," explained Anstis.

PC users are warned not to open executable files attached to e-mail messages from e-mail addresses they do not recognize or trust and to refrain from opening any message that purports to feature nude celebrities.