MYDoom Damns Spam

As Internet users around the world scramble to avoid catching the dreaded MyDoom virus, one interesting result of this cyber disease has manifested: the effect it's having on porn spammers. As many of us know from getting penis enlargement ads in our email Inbox, many adult-related companied use spam as a method of marketing and promotion. These companies send out mass emails to lists they have built up, acquired or purchased to adevrtise their site, porn movie, affiliate program or products.

Well, now that the MyDoom worm has system administrators on ultra high alert and email boxes at their fullest, many folks are drastically modifying their filtering systems to their most sensitive, or least discriminating, depending on how you look at it. And many folks are avoiding the risk, or can't handle the volume, of checking through these quarantined messages to confirm if they are viruses or not. All this is having a dire effect of adult Webmasters in the spam promo biz.

One such victim was 420Times.com and 420Girls.com owner Rob Smith. Smith, who runs a pro-hemp adult site that features girls and rock stars revealing their love of marijuana and (in the girls' cases) being photographed nude. Smith was hit with the MyDoom virus (formally called W32.Novarg.A@mm) last Wednesday, and suddenly found his business had ground to a halt. The virus infected his computer and sent itself out by email to his entire contact database. In other words, his email list of 50,000 was sent the virus with his personal name on it. Doh!

"It totally screwed me up and cost me about $3,000 in lost work and time and everything," Smith told me for AVN Online. "People were threatening lawsuits for sending the virus to them. They didn't know what was going on or what it was."

Yet once Smith relived himself of the actual virus, he realized his troubles had only just begun.

"The problem now is that lots of people aren't getting business emails because the spam filters from their hosts and ISPs," said Smith. "So people are losing deals because a spam filter grabs a legitimize business email and considers it a virus spam."

According to Reuters, the worm infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and has been sent to millions of people. Another variant of the virus has already started spreading. No word from pornographers as to how many were hurt by the virus in one way or another, or how many porn spam recipients wept with joy when they realized that MyDoom inadvertently resulted in a deliverance from porn spam....

For more information on the virus and how to remove it, please visit http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html

Already got the virus? Check out Microsoft's MyDoom response and fix: http://www.microsoft.com/security