If you are connecting through Comcast running Windows, you might want to “batten the hatches…”
Comcast’s high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.
Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.
Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company’s official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers–a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams for each American family every day.
Zombie computers arise when spammers seize on bugs in Microsoft Windows–or from naive users who click on attachments–to take over PCs and transform them into spambots. [CNET News.com]