Most people just have knee-jerk reactions against spamming, but I’ve been wondering when and where it will become a viable business model with people who are doing it well gaining a certain measure of respectability instead of universal defilement. Maybe we’re a long way off, but I really enjoy the crazy tech jargon in this article:

The owners of the Storm botnet, whose identities are as yet unknown, could be preparing to sell off the “services” of segments of the network, according to Joe Stewart, a researcher from managed security services company SecureWorks.

Stewart claimed in a blog post on Sunday that the latest Storm variants now use a 40-byte key to encrypt their peer-to-peer traffic, meaning each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key.

“This effectively allows the Storm author to segment the Storm botnet into smaller networks,” Stewart wrote in his blog post. “This could be a precursor to selling Storm to other spammers, as an end-to-end spam botnet system, complete with fast-flux DNS and hosting capabilities. If that’s the case, we might see a lot more of Storm in the future.”

Fast-flux service networks are networks of compromised computer systems with public DNS records that are constantly changing, making it more difficult to track and control criminal activities, according to the Honeynet Project Research Alliance, a forum of honeypot research organizations. A honeypot is a system, often undefended, set up as a trap for attackers.