quote:
As part of the WASC Distributed Open Proxy Honeypot Project (DOPHP), we have been able to track some pretty extensive distributed brute force attacks against Yahoo end-user email accounts. Valid email accounts and/or obtaining valid account credentials are a huge commodity for SPAMMERS. Identifying valid accounts is important as it allows them to only send SPAM messages to real accounts and they can also be able to sell lists of valid accounts to other SPAMMERS. Taking this a step further, if the SPAMMERS are able to enumerate valid credentials for an account (username and password) they can then hijack the account and use it for SPAMMING.
more : http://tacticalwebappsec.blogspot.com/2009/09/distributed-brute-force-attacks-against.html
[via isc]