Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam: Turns out spam is coming from places other than you might think. It’s tempting to envision spam coming from some centralized location so we can all sit around and complain that they don’t shut the loser off, but the reality appears to be different.
Four-fifths of spam now emanates from computers contaminated with Trojan horse infections, according to a study by network management firm Sandvine out this week. Trojans and worms with backdoor components such as Migmaf and SoBig have turned infected Windows PCs into drones in vast networks of compromised zombie PCs. […]
Sandvine’s analysis, cross referenced with data from SORBS, to determine what IP space is assigned to residential subscriber pools of global service providers, shows most spam now originating from residential broadband networks.
Hackers hijack federal computers: Not even the federal government is immune. This must be the zombie controllers' Holy Grail, because I imagine the feds have some decidedly fast machines lying around hooked up to some decidedly fast connections. Hundreds of powerful computers at the Defense Department and U.S. Senate were…
My business mail server got blacklisted the other day. We started getting consistent bounces from a couple of clients that referenced some odd site. A little poking around revealed that our mail server had been inexplicably identified as an open relay and was on a spam blacklist that…
Home PCs rented out in sabotage racket: This is just hideous. Now they have "zombie brokers" that will rent you a zombie network they've created. Vast networks of home computers are being rented out without their owners' knowledge to spammers, fraudsters and digital saboteurs, security experts say. The terminals…
Dynamic DNS for your IP Address: Irritated that your broadband ISP changes your IP address every now and again so you can't map a domain name and run a server? Solve that problem for $20 a year, but watch out that you don't create a new problem. The DNS2Go client…