] Now the blocklisters are being overwhelmed by Internet
] saboteurs who harness large numbers of computers to
] bombard their victims with vast amounts of junk data.

For the last couple months, spam-blocker sites such as Osirusoft, monkeys.com, Spamhaus and Spamcop have been under Distributed Denial of Service attacks by up to 10,000 computers at once. Two days ago, Osirusoft imploded, and shut itself down by blacklisting the entire internet, meaning many businesses who relied on Osirusoft's service became unable to receive any email, even if legitimate.

I've been hearing a lot of speculation lately as to whether these DDoS attacks might be related to the Blaster or Sobig worms. Some people say no, they're unrelated. Others say yes, and think that spammers may be behind the coordinated attacks, by hiring blackhat hackers to generate the attacks and create the worms. So this school of thought says that along with the attacks on the spam-blockers, that the worms are intended to create an army of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers, which may eventually be used to send out even more spam.

Another school of thought proposes that yes, the attacks may be coordinated, but for a different reason -- that the attacks on the anti-spam sites have been to restrict their spam-blocking effect so that the Sobig worm (which requires spam email to propagate itself) could spread more effectively.

Regardless of whether the DDoS attacks are connected to Sobig, what *is* the ultimate purpose of the Sobig worm? Is its "raison d'etre" simply to breed and propagate itself as fast and as far and wide as it can? Or is it just a very efficient delivery mechanism, recruiting hundreds of thousands of computers for some other yet-to-be-defined purpose, be it spam or an even more destructive attack in the future?

Or, might the intent even be a benign one -- a worm created to be *so* pervasive and annoying that even the non-tech home users in the world hear about it, and are finally encouraged to secure their systems? In other words, could it have been created as a way of "vaccinating" the internet and building up its immunity to help it withstand a potentially even more malicious virus in the future?

Stay tuned, as the story unfolds . . .