With the amount of spam online combined with people’s interest in celebrities is bound to make this new spam tactic quite successful.  The newest trend of sending spam is to use celebrity names to help entice people to look at the messages.  Of course, this is not just spam we are talking about either.  The new celebrity spam is being used to construct a botnet, which seems to be building quite successfully for the time being.  Of course it really is nothing new, yet people will still let curiosity get the best of them…

A copycat spam gang has launched an effort to compromise PCs that rivals the botnet created by the infamous Storm Worm Gang.

The botnet established by the Celebrity Spam Gang, so-named for a habit of using celebrity names in malware, is currently responsible for 20 per cent of junk mails in circulation, according to net security firm Marshal.

Marshal reckons the gang has been building up its botnet since August 2006 when it began chucking out messages with infected attachments that commonly promise nude images of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears. Other tactics include disguising malware-tainted attachments as free games or Windows Security Updates.

All this is fairly standard stuff, yet the gang has enjoyed considerable success.[more]

Tags: Spam