"Gotterspammerung
By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005; 10:48 AM
Spamwurst rides again.
Almost a year after they first appeared, hundreds of German-language junk e-mails are once more sprouting up in many people's inboxes. The first messages arrived Saturday with subject lines such as "Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On," "Multi-Kulturell=Multi-Kriminell" and "Dresden Bombing Is to Be Regretted Enormously," the latter being a classic example of the passive-voice sentence that sounds as mellifluous in German as it sounds ridiculous in English.
The technological details come courtesy of Australian IT reporter Chris Jenkins: "A spokeswoman for e-mail filtering group Message Labs said the e-mails had been propagated by the 'Sober.q' variant of the Sober worm, the first generation of which appeared in 2003." Jenkins reported that the people who mounted the campaign used computers hijacked with the worm to double as the senders. This explains why the spam comes from all sorts of different address, including people whom you might know."
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