I am a Spammer.

[swestrup]

I got news a couple of days ago that my network had been listed in a spam blacklist. I double checked (I've had false reports in the past) and they confirmed it. I was heading out of the house at the time, so I couldn't pursue it further.

I just got home and the first thing I did was start logging all outgoing smtp connections, and blocking all that didn't come from my mail server. Sure enough, my own machine is busily trying to send out hundreds of spams. It must have been doing this for at least a week. No idea how long, other than it must be since I last ran a virus/trojan scan last month.

I know you're supposed to run them nightly, but on a 500 gb drive, the 'nightly' scan takes three days, and not one of the highly rated programs I use have a "suspend after N hours and resume later" function. Anyway, I've just started the scans. Hopefully they find the culprit, otherwise I'll have to get more esoteric.

Comments

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

As someone who occasionally works an ISP abuse desk, I can say that it's surprisingly common.

You might find it interesting to try to track the control channel.

[swestrup]

I'm more interested in identifying it and getting rid of it. So far, AVG anti-rootkit didn't find anything, nor did Spybot-S&D or Ad-Aware. RootkitRevealer found a couple of suspicious registry entries, but that's all. Still not enough info to determine what I'm dealing with here.