So, who exactly is Ron Paul and why was spam touting him flying around the internet? Well, this presidential candidate was apparently inadvertently getting a helping hand from a Ukrainian based botnet to get the word out.
No, he isn’t a botmaster.
From InfoWorld:
“It probably wasn’t even set up by a Ron Paul supporter,” he said. “This whole system has been around since 2004. This [spam] somehow just landed in this underground spam economy.”
When spam first surfaced, trumpeting Paul as the winner of a recent Republican presidential debate, the fact that it was being sent via illegally infected machines raised eyebrows. The spam messages have never been directly linked to the Ron Paul campaign, which has denied any involvement in the incident.
The Texas congressman is considered a long-shot contender for the Republican presidential nomination, but he has a strong Internet presence. His videos are popular on YouTube, and Ron Paul fundraisers recently were able to raise more than $4 million in a 24-hour period.
Stewart published an analysis of the botnet on Tuesday, connecting it to an Eastern European spammer known as “spm,” whose company, Elphisoft, sends unsolicited e-mail using a network of about 3,000 infected “botnet” PCs. Stewart believes that spm, and many of the people involved in his operation, are located in the Ukraine.
The botnet server used to manage the Ron Paul spam was located in the United States and shut down in mid-November, giving researchers a chance to examine the software on the machine, Stewart explained.
[tags]Ron Paul, Ron Paul Spam, Spammers, Botnet[/tags]