A Trojan Porn Virus attacks Spam fighters

It turns out that spam stopping websites are under an attack from an irate spammer.

The Mimail-L Windows virus poses as an e-mail from a woman called Wendy who writes about a sexual encounter and offers readers nude photographs.

Opening the message’s attachment rewards users with a virus that forwards itself to everyone in their e-mail address book.

It also turns infected machines into junk mail relays that can be used to forward thousands of messages to one of eight anti-spam websites.

Now the clever part to all of this is that the virus sends an email to the infect computer saying that the user’s credit card was charge for the porn pictures and it leaves an address for them to write o if their credit card was wrongly charged.

The fake message gives a billing address that people can complain to if their card has been wrongly debited. However, this e-mail address is for the Spamhaus Project which is fighting spam rather than a child porn peddler.

“So many Internet users are flooding us with complaints about these child porn CDs that we supposedly ordered for them,” said Steve Linford, founder of the Spamhaus Project.

Mr Linford said he was co-operating with the police to find out who was behind the Mimail-L virus.

He suspects that it is the work of an irate spammer, irritated at the success Spamhaus and other organisations are having defeating junk mail messages.

The virus isn’t widespread but all should keep their anti-vrus software up to date and beware of this little ploy.