Conficker - the culprit of 'spam tsunami'

After being successfully upgraded on the night of 9 April, Conficker-infected PCs became 'Spam Robot' with the ability to send billions of spam every day .

The inevitable consequence of this - security vendor Kaspersky warns - is that the global Internet world will face a "real spam tsunami". The main role in creating this "tsunami" is the Waledac malware that goes along with Conficker during this upgrade.

Kaspersky's Alex Gostev, a research expert, said that according to the company's statistics, within 12 hours a PC infected with Conficker could send a total of 42,298 spam.

' Making a simple calculation will see that a PC like this will be able to send about 80,000 spam messages a day. If there are about 5 million PCs like this, there will be about 400 billion spam messages sent every day . '

The main topic of spam messages is still advertising pharmaceutical products like Viagra or Cialis with a Subject (like) like ' She will dream of you days and nights! 'or' Hot life - our help here. Ensure your potence [sic] today! .

Each spam contains a separate independent link against spam-killing tools that analyze how often domains are used in email.

' We found that this time Conficker distributed spam has used about 40,542 third-level domains and more than 33 second-level domains ,' Gostev said. ' All of these domain names belong to spammers and companies that hire these people distribute advertising messages .'

Security experts also warned about spam and fake security software that came with the latest Conficker variant, which is the clearest evidence that a computer developer could make money.