Hijacked Computers Responsible For One-Third Of All Spam

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from the you're-a-spammer-and-you-don't-even-know-it dept

Plenty of stories have been written about how many spammers are now using hijacked machines infected with some sort of trojan horse program to send out their spam. However, someone from an anti-virus company is saying that these “Remote Access Trojans (RATs)” are now responsible for one-third of all spam. Ouch. Of course, they don’t back this up with any evidence, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. They seem to be getting plenty of publicity for this statement – but don’t give any suggestions on how to solve this problem. If they’re hyping it so much, you’d think those same articles would tell people how to protect themselves. Since the issue is so widespread, and education is unlikely to help, you have to wonder if a better solution is to have the broadband ISPs help out by determining which machines have been turned into “zombies” and alerting the owners.