Fresh Round of Georgia Spam Adds to Botnet

The conflict between Russia and Georgia is being used to evade spam filters, reports vnunet.com. Spammers are using a fake BBC story that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is homosexual to get readers to a virus-laden Web page in order to add to botnets controlled by pro-Russian individuals.

As of last Friday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Spam Data Mine showed the messages make up 5 percent of the spam traffic. The team has traced the messages back to 44 spam-sending computers, six of which are located in Russia.

According to Network World, Symantec says the malicious software is a variant of the Trojan.Blusod program. But Gary Warner, a director of computer research and forensics at the university, disagrees. Warner says the malware must be new since 36 antivirus products, including Symantec itself, was not detecting the Trojan program.

Georgia began claiming it was the victim of cyber warfare earlier this month. But there has been debate about whether Russia is behind the attacks. Some say that if the Russian government were responsible, it would have done a better job.