Mass-mailer
Malware that sends copies of itself by email
Mass-mailers are worms that use email to propagate across the internet.
Generally using email addresses harvested from the local machine, mass-mailers send out mails to these addresses with a copy of their own code as an attachment. Various forms of social engineering are used to persuade recipients to open the attachment, and often spoofed 'from' addresses are used - perhaps that of the person whose address book has been harvested - to add legitimacy. As well as address books, some mass-mailers will search the whole system for possible email addresses. Many types include their own SMTP engine to send mails without using the system's own email setup, which may be protected by security or may alert the user to the worm's presence.
