Spammers work their way around web mail

According to security company BitDefender spammers have already used the new technology to create more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts.

The Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email.

Every active copy of the Trojan accesses an email account, then pulls encrypted spam e-mails from a website, decrypts them and sends them to valid addresses.

According to Tech Blorge, the spammer is advertising a site which makes "pharmacy products". So far this sort of spamming has been impossible because it required a machine to work out what numbers and letters were installed on a captcha screen. Since this is something that only a human could do, free mail services have been protected.

However if the spammers have worked out a way of getting around the problem then the free mail services will have to come up with a new idea.

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