The Guardian may have the reason for the last round of spam attacks that I (and everyone else) have been seeing on the net: a growing botnet:

It gets worse. Storm's delivery mechanism changes regularly. It began as PDF spam, then morphed into e-cards and YouTube invites. It then started posting blog-comment spam, again trying to trick viewers into clicking infected links. Similarly, the Storm email changes all the time, with new, topical subject lines and text. And last month Storm began attacking anti-spam sites focused on identifying it. It has also attacked the personal website of a malware expert who published an analysis of how it worked.

I had been wondering about those waves (PDFs and e-cards) of spam. More recently (I mentioned this the other day), I've been seeing tons more comment spam than normal. I wonder if there's a specific plan, or whether someone is building a huge "rent a bot" (or heck, maybe they already have) network? Would I see a difference between spread attempts and spam campaigns that were paid for?

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