IE 7 reaches 100 million users

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Windows malware is used by even more end users

Where DOES all that spam come from? Why, compromised home PCs, of course. And who owns the home PC market? Microsoft. Thanks to Microsoft, EVERYBODY, regardless of their OS, can enjoy spam, and the effects of the overheads it causes on the internet. I can't think why Microsoft's PR department haven't had ZDnet run an infomercial entitled "100% of Home Users suffer from Windows generated spam".

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1942262,00.html


"The growth in spam is also showing up at companies such as Postini, which analyses internet traffic using its filtering system before delivering it to clients. "We're seeing growth in overall spam in terms of volume and relative percentage," says Postini founder Scott Petry. The company monitored nearly 70bn emails in September and October, and spam levels soared by 59% during that period. The company says that 91% of emails are now spam.

Why? There is no single cause, say experts, but rather a confluence of unfortunate events. One of the biggest problems is that the main vehicle for spam - vast networks of home computers infected with malware, known as "botnets" - have been growing in size.

These botnets have existed for about five years. They are created when worms or Trojan horse programs are used to infect a PC, taking control of it and forcing it to accept commands sent by a central controller. The commands, traditionally sent via a real-time online chat protocol called Internet Relay Chat (IRC), were initially used to force large numbers of bots to attack a target web site, flooding it with traffic in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Money-motivated operators

DDoS attacks still happen, but bots are increasingly used to send spam emails, in effect acting as their own mail servers. In the 1990s, spam was mostly channelled via unprotected email servers online, used to send thousands of unsolicited emails anonymously. But then network administrators began locking them down.

Now, spammers send email directly from home machines thanks to botnet operators who program them to become email servers and then sell their processing power and bandwidth. These money-motivated operators are honing their product, warns David Watson, who works on the UK Honeynet project (ukhoneynet.org), a non-profit research effort to track spammers' activities."

Posted by: whisperycat   Posted on: 01/16/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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