News You Can Bruise for 2000 May 5

Enough with these sissy email worms! I'll tell you how to write an email worm, dammit. Don't just look in the victim's address book. Look in their mail archive. Use the mail archive to a) find more emails to send the worm to, and b) create a plausible subject line for each address. If you can't find a plausible subject line (if there's no recent thread for that address), generate one at random. Use a CFG that can do a couple million different subject lines of twenty different major types.

Don't make someone run an application to do all this for you; hijack Outlook and do it yourself. Melissa had the right idea.

Scan for interesting keywords and send messages that match to a randomly selected set of 1-3 email addresses (out of of 10,000) 100 of those email addresses are controlled by you, throwaway accounts and whatnot. The other 9900 belong to random people. You now get lots of juicy email and implicate lots of innocent bystanders.

Encrypt all these lists of email addresses, fragments of subject lines, etc. Use real encryption and not pansy XOR encryption so that it will take a couple days instead of a couple minutes to get your plaintext.

Is this so difficult? I can figure out how to do a good email worm and I'm not even particularily evil. What's up with these evil people who foist lame email worms upon the Windows world?