By tackling the web shops that profit from spam, UK net firms hope to remove the financial incentive to send junk mail.
Botnets can send spam and flood Web sites with countless requests for information, a cyber attack also known as distributed denial of service.
Using a large database of known suspicious or bad source IP addresses, even URLs, has made dramatic improvements to spam filters and web security gateways.
While free Web services produced just 6% of the Internet's pill-hawking and scam-pitching e-mail a year ago, automated spam programs exploiting Web e-mail services now produce more than 12% of digital junk mail, with Microsoft's Webmail services alone accounting for around 4%.
Botnets start when a virus infects a computer, either through spam or an infected web page.
Over the past year, the volume of spam e-mail from Web-based mail services like Gmail, Yahoo!
Stock-scam Web sites can reach millions instantly via spam E-mail and banner advertising at little or no cost.
These "zombies" are turned to a variety of malicious purposes, ranging from participating in denial of service attacks on Web sites to generating huge batches of spam e-mail.
For instance, said Mr Hogan, filtering out e-mail messages that contain a web link can stop about 75% of spam.
Until now, Storm's creators have been focused on growing its ranks: Infected computers have sent out spam, drawing users to compromised Web sites that hijack more PCs.
One part of Google is busy creating indexes of online information while at the same time filtering out "spam, " which in this context means Web sites whose only function is to make money off the fact you land on them, without providing any sort of "value-added" information in the process.
Many of the apparently fraudulent Web sites trying to tap into Katrina relief donations feature pop-ups, spam through provided links and other unsolicited e-mails.
The software, originally spread through classic methods such as spam, has moved on to more sophisticated attacks by providing links to infected web sites through popular social media content such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, by feeding a corrupted advertisement into an ad network for web sites, and by poisoning search results called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) poisoning.
The changes to the latest version of Yahoo Mail include removing some of the boxes that filled the page in the Web version and offering thumbnail images of attachments, presumably to help avoid clicking on scams, spam and other unwanted content.
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