Spam Zombies Play Larger Role in Spam Attacks

According to the spam filter provider, Postini large waves of spam are increasingly due to the work of "spam zombies." Spam zombies are PC's that have had their security compromised been compromised by any number of different exploits and then utilized by spammers to send spam.

Sometimes the system is exploited via a bug in the operating system, other times a user unintentionally infects themselves with a virus. A combination of user education and increased network security is required to fight of the hordes of "living dead" computers. Sometime users may notice nothing unusual with their systems. In other cases they may notice a decrease in performance and reliability.

Postini's data also indicated that spam emails did drop slightly for the month of October - down to a total of 69% of all messages sent.

Users who want to block unwanted email should investigate installing a spam email stopper such as SpamButcher.

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