[Contributed by Mickey C. of Whizardries]

If you are old enough, you probably remember those shows which had some shady character calling someone over to a darkened corner or alleyway and saying “Psst! Hey, buddy! Need a watch?” He would then open up his trenchcoat and reveal a few (dozen) samples of stolen or faked Rolex watches.

As I looked through my GMail account the other day I noticed that I was starting to get a lot of spam for fake Rolex watches. It seems that the shady character of yesteryear has now moved to the Internet.

As I looked at the headers of those messages, I noticed that most of them were coming from IP addresses that would appear to belong to compromised machines. That is, they belong to people who have been tricked into opening a virus and so opening a window for someone else to control their connection to the Internet…. [Continued…]