According to Spamhaus.org, a fair number of internet addresses assigned to the Egyptian president's wife have been taken over by hackers.
The spam analysis organisation says that around 5,000 IP addresses were assigned some years ago to Suzanne Mubarak and the Suzanne Mubarak Science Exploration Centre.
Reporting on the saga, security researcher Brian Krebs says that these addresses "have been used recently to promote a variety of dodgy Web businesses, and that the hijacked block is under the control of an organisation that has ties to alleged spammer Michael Lindsay and iMedia Networks."
Krebs quotes Rod Rasmussen, CTO of Internet Identity, as saying that this latest internet land grab is an example of how spammers are becoming more brazen in their quest for non-blacklisted internet address space from which to send spam.
Rasmussen told the security researcher that these types of hijackers tend to target chunks of addresses assigned to governments and defence contractors, because those allocations are less likely to be reported missing, and very few of them are blocked by anti-spam tools.
"Another chunk of addresses that Spamhaus found were recently hijacked by spammers – 255 IPs originally assigned in 1994 to an organisation called the now defunct Claremont Technology Group – appears to have been stolen sometime after the organisation let its domain claretech.com lapse", noted Krebs in his security blog.
"That domain now redirects to Falls Church, Va.-based government contractor Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), which acquired Claremont in 1998", he said.
Spamhaus, says Krebs, also tracked several other notable IP blocks that were hijacked by spammers recently, including more than 65,000 addresses assigned back in 1987 to Fisher-Rosemount Inc. out of Marshalltown, Iowa.
"The rightful owner of that space is Emerson Process Management, a $6 billion division of $21 billion industrial giant Emerson Corp. Emerson Process Management builds wireless devices used to remotely control and monitor complex industrial systems, such as power and chemical plants", he said.