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Microsoft's Vigilante Investigation of Zombies

Posted by Zonk on from the busting-undead-skull dept.

Morgalyn writes "According to an article at Information Week, Microsoft has decided to fight zombie-launched spam in their own way. In conjunction with the FTC and consumer rights groups, Microsoft set up a clean computer and then infected it. They monitored the 'zombie' over the course of 20 days - 'In those 20 days, this one computer received 5 million connection requests from spammers, and sent 18 million spam messages'. This whole operation has led to the (partial) identification of 13 different spamming groups, some of which reside in the US and may be prosecuted under the CAN-SPAM act."

2 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Interesting... by psbrogna · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    My guess? They discovered infected computers internally and just make up this story after the fact. This is probably just some "MS Win Sysadmin" (sic) thinking on his feet.

  2. Re:Vigilante? --- THE ZONK EFFECT ---- by putko · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Didn't you notice the original article was written by Zonk (aka li'l Zonky)?

    He does this sort of inflammatory crap all the time.

    This is a non-story --- clearly Microsoft is doing some PR. Rather than auditing their codebase, using formal methods or other techniques to root out flaws, they've decided to do a feelgood story and feed it to the press.

    Useful idiots like li'l Zonky will push it for them.

    --
    http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_s tone_your_children/dt21_18a.html