Fergie's Tech Blog

2006 Declared Year Of The Zombies

Antone Gonsalves writes on TechWeb News:

Broadband-connected computers commandeered by spammers drove a 30% increase in the amount of spam headed to consumer e-mail boxes and corporate networks, an e-mail security firm says.

Remotely controlled armies of computers, called zombies, spread to all regions of the world in 2006, with as many as 8 million computers spewing billions of junk e-mails on any given day, Commtouch said Wednesday in its 2006 Spam Trends Report.

Zombies accounted for 85% of spam circulating the Internet, Commtouch said. Half of all phishing attempts involved spam posing as e-mail from eBay or PayPal.

On any given day, from 6 million to 8 million zombies were active, with spammers operating individual armies of as many as 200,000 hijacked computers.

posted by Fergie @ 12/27/2006 11:28:00 AM