Cisco Fights Spam Zombies

P-Cube - a company recently purchased by Cisco is developing a new spam filter software technology to fight `spam zombies' It's estimated that upwards of 50 percent of spam is sent by zombified PC's.

A computer can get turned into a zombie by installing a piece of malicious software - delivered via a Trojan horse, virus or worm. A `backdoor' is installed on the computer - which listens to a certain TCP/IP port - waiting for a command from its master The spammer / hacker then sends instructions to the infected systems - causing them all to respond in unison.

Sometimes zombies are used for large scale denial-of-service attacks - where thousands of computers make millions of requests to a website in an effort to take it offline. More commonly they're using to send Viagra spam.

The article doesn't go into great detail - but presumably P-Cube's anti-spam tool would be implemented on a Cisco hardware platform.

For those seeking immediate spam relief - SpamButcher is available as a free spam blocker download - with a 21-day trial period.

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