The HotLan Trojan is the latest development of an industry that is apparantly worth a lot of money. Recently it was reported that the captcha system had been cracked, and aparently that has been done by the creators of the HotLan Trojan. The trojan was able to setup more than 500,000 hotmail accounts and over 40,000 gmail accounts. The technology behind it is advanced. The CAPTCHA image is sent to a server which deciphers is and sends the deciphered string back to the form where it gets filled in the right field.

A spokesperson from BitDefender Anti-Virus Lab says that gmail accounts usually get blocked within 4 days. I wonder how many accounts can be created by the trojan in 4 days though - this could become a race against time, or, as the dutch say "bringing water to the ocean". I can't help but conclude that the spam business is a very profitable business.