Trends Bug Report: A Look At A Spammers Attempt To Use The Mega-D Botnet By David Cawley | 2 minute read Dear Spammer Technical Support, I’d like to submit a bug report for your recent spam run. We’re usually entertained with hilarious Subject lines and bizarre message content but your latest offering was quite poor. The Subject line of the message was $DIKSBJ and the body simply contained $DIKBODY and $DIKLINK along with a short text string. So it seems the variables in your configuration template are not being substituted correctly. I’ve attached a screen shot for you to view. I realize you sent this via the Mega-D (aka Mega-Dik) Botnet so I can understand the $DIKSBJ choice of parameter name but it’s just not that interesting. Perhaps if it’s not a bug in your software, you might educate the user renting out your bots, on how to configure it properly. After all, they’re probably already paying you large amounts of money for the service. Here are recent examples of Subject lines when everything went smoothly: Subject: Huge dimension gives increased forceSubject: Gigantic dimension is a great powerSubject: Prodigious preparation is to your serviceSubject: Perfect proportions are easily attained One more thing, the problem also exists with your blog spam… A quick search on Google shows several hundred results for the same parameter names. Could you let me know when you expect to have a fix for this issue? Thanks, David