Be wary when sifting through your inbox as there’s a new type of maulicious email to look out for. 

A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails, that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.

You can read about it over at TorrentFreak.

I’ve definately experienced this with one of my DARKCOLD email addresses, but thankfully never my gmail (because it’s not published anywhere). What happens is you get email in your inbox from a mail server saying that an email YOU sent couldn’t be delivered (which you never really sent), and if you look at an excerpt (if included) it’s likely to be spam. This could either mean your computer is infected and being used as a zombie to send spam, or more likely that your email address has been harvested by a spammer (could happen if you sign up for anything dodgy or have your email address in plain view, perhaps a message board?) and used as the sender of the email. Spammers do this because some web servers block email from domains or email addresses which don’t exist.

You can read more about backscatter over at PC World.