the imbroglio

I just noticed that I have nearly 15,000 messages in my Spam mail box. SpamSieve tells me that in the last year, 60% of my messages have been spam. Over that time, I have received an average of 87 spam messages each day. What’s most troubling is that in the past month, that average has gone up to 220 spam messages each day. Yesterday alone I had 227 spam messages, the day before that was 264, and the day before that was 248.

Yeah, I think this is a problem.

Now I learn (via Daring Fireball), that:

The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.

Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.

. . .

The botnet stats tracker even logs the version of Windows the infected client is running, down to the service pack level. One chart commandeered by Stewart showed that Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) machines dominate the makeup of the botnet, a clear sign that the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system is falling prey to attacks.

Great.

[tags]microsoft, spam[/tags]