MarkMonitor's study analyzed 2, 986 sites hawking major pharmaceutical brands pulled from its pool of spam e-mails.
This month, the report honed in on a species of brand hijacking that clogs in-boxes daily: spam e-mails hawking name-brand discount drugs.
Botnets -- some of which are large enough to deploy tens of billions of spam e-mails a day -- are often used in extortion schemes.
It said the spyware tried to trick people into handing over their credit card details as well as installing software to send thousands of spam e-mails.
"Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users' mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail, " said the spokesperson.
"They knock off users who look like they are sending large numbers of spam e-mails - an indication of being part of a botnet, " he told BBC News.
It lately has taken to shutting down groups and individuals who, Hoffman says, send spam e-mails to strangers just to build up their networks or take some of LinkedIn's revenue by recruiting other members without its permission.
Along with millions of other out-of-date and unsecured PCs strung together by the Internet--what Corman calls "the leper colony"--those machines represent a combined mass of computing power responsible for most of the Net's spam e-mails, much of its click fraud, and the vicious "denial of service" attacks that can knock sites offline and even destroy online businesses altogether.
Hi-tech criminals use botnets to send out spam, phishing e-mails and launch attacks on websites.
Prosecutors said PW Marketing violated the 1998 anti-spam law because these unsolicited e-mails were sent without a free call number for recipients to phone to stop additional mailings.
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 outbox shows your avatars enjoying a drink, and if there are any e-mails which your spam manager is unsure about you will find them skating around in the hotel's ice ring.
It's a question not only of spam and virus control, but archiving all e-mails as required by Securities and Exchange Commission law.
The judgement, which Mr Lockyer said will be the model for future spam injunctions, forbids PW Marketing from sending unsolicited commercial e-mails, accessing computers that belong to other people without their permission and disguising its identity by sending messages that appear to originate from a different address.
It compares its vocabulary with e-mails which it knows do not contain spam.
Many said they didn't even mind being sent the flurry of Spark e-mails they say didn't strike them as spam.
The Georgetown study concluded that 75% of people cite e-mails about charitable and political causes have the whiff of spam, and complain about too many servings.
That means either educating the tiny fraction of consumers who do spend money in response to spam's marketing pitches, or making spammers pay to send their billions of e-mails.
应用推荐