Hotlan trojan on attack - targets Hotmail n Gmail accounts

Captcha images have been used to ensure that only people and not computers can create an email account.

But here is a new trojan, which is known as HotLan, which gets around this setup by sending off the captcha image back to the server in an encrypted form controlled by a spammer.

In this process, the image's characters are determined by the server and the solution is sent back to the trojan which inserts the characters into the form and creates the account.

Once this is done, the account details are then sent back to the spammer to use to send out unsolicited junk mail.