Microsoft Tests Spam Zombie Software

It's surely been done before, but recently Microsoft employees conducted an interesting experiment. They intentionally infected a test system with malicious software from the internet to turn it into a "spam zombie."

The system was isolated, blocking junk email from actually reaching anyone's inbox. Over the course of 20 days the system would have sent nearly 20 million spam messages. The system was allowed to "join" a network of fellow zombie computers which announced their presence to spammers. Thousands of would-be junk senders attempted to request the computer send email on their behalf.

One would have to speculate in a "real world" scenario, it couldn't actually broadcast that many emails due to bandwidth limitations. Still, the system clearly could have sent a lot of spam.

As part of Microsoft's continued legal attack on spammers, it is now trying to use the collected data in an effort to locate the parties responsible for authoring the software. While its efforts at spam filtering software haven't proven very fruitful, Microsoft has been aggressively working with authorities to press charges against spammers who abuse its networks.

Most users become infected with zombie software as the result of installing questionable free downloads, opening infected email attachments or having their computer exploited directly via a security flaw.

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