First 'warchalking' now 'warspamming'

'Warspammers' are taking advantage of unprotected wireless LANs to send out millions of junk emails.

The proliferation of insecure corporate wireless networks is fuelling the growth of drive-by spamming, a security expert warned this week.

Speaking at the First International Security Users Conference in London, Adrian Wright, managing director of Secoda Risk Management, warned that junk emailers are taking advantage of unprotected wireless local area networks to bombard email users with unsolicited and unwelcome messages.

Wright said: "These people simply drive up to a building armed with their pornographic email, log into the insecure wireless network, send the message to 10 million email addresses and then just drive away."

A drive-by spammer would send spam by finding an unprotected SMTP port on a company's server and then sending email as if they were a legitimate user of the company's network.

The ability to send spam through a company's network without its knowledge could allow the spammer to avoid bandwidth costs - which can be substantial for tens or hundreds of thousands of emails. It also makes it much more difficult to trace the spam back to the spammer - useful for those who send spam as a service for other companies and who may have been in trouble with the law.

Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet.co.uk