At Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:45:52 -0400 romanvictor at rvpmdesigns.com wrote: > > ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > ** If you did, we all thank you. > > > Hi Jim, > > By driving the user to what I call the dark-side web site a virus or malware > can get installed just by viewing the dark-side site's hidden iframes. > Sometimes, I think what you maybe seeing are tests of zombie botnet systems. It could also be a flavor of Denial Of Service attack as well -- simply sending zillions of these messages with the sole intent of making sendmail too busy to deal with ligit E-Mail. Or to flood someone's inbox to the point that it becomes impossible to get to ligit E-Mail because so much time is being used to delete the junk. It is also possible that there is some sort of contact form on at the website site pointed to by the E-Mail. Many of the products and services offered by these spam E-Mails are not 100% legal (eg prescription drugs being sold *without* a prescription), the people selling these items have reasons NOT to provide any sort of contact information. Instead, you enter a shipping address and some sort of payment info (eg CC#) and they mail the product out to you, assuming that they are in fact honest -- it could also be a complete scam / ripoff -- much of the time, the products or services are in fact non-existent and the whole point is to collect credit card numbers and related sorts of information for the purpose of pure theft. Most spam is not for totally legal products or services. Because spam itself is so 'grey' marketing at best (even what the product or service is itself 'legal', the marketing process is not really 100% legal), spammers are going to avoid including any contact info in the E-Mail messages, since that makes it real easy for ISPs to take direct legal action. It is easy/trivial to just point to a website someplace where the contact info of the owner is difficult/impossible to get (eg China Russia) and put on that website a form that collects customer info. The spammer can then contact the customer to complete whatever transaction might be involved. In the case of the Iowa case, the spammers, just 'sold' the customer contact info to third party, who than contacted the customer. Actually, for most of the 'work at home' comeons and the debt services, the spammer is just collecting customer contact info ('leads') and selling this info to third parties, who then contact the customer. As happened in the Iowa case, it required a bit of work to set up a 'trap' of sorts to uncover the identity of the spammers. -- Robert Heller -- Get the Deepwoods Software FireFox Toolbar! Deepwoods Software -- Linux Installation and Administration http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Web Hosting, with CGI and Database heller at deepsoft.com -- Contract Programming: C/C++, Tcl/Tk