Microsoft's Vigilante Investigation of Zombies

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."

Comments

Re:Steve Ballmer on Zombies

[non0score]

By throwing chairs at them?

How it was infected.

[DarkFencer]

Microsoft set up a clean computer and then infected it.

And of course, by 'infected it' they mean 'installed Windows XP' and left it unpatched and connected to the net for 30 seconds.

Interesting...

[Edd!3]

I wonder how microsoft infected this computer, my guess is they installed the latest Vista build.

Vigilante?

[RPoet]

How is this vigilantism? I thought we called it honeypots. Except, perhaps, when Microsoft does it?

How come when it's Microsoft?

[SComps]

How come when it's Microsoft doing something it's called vigilante but when it's somebody else doing it, it's called a honeypot? Come on guys? I see this as a positive thing.

anyone been getting a lot of spam lately?

[bosewicht]

There must be something going on, i got 18 million spam emails in somehting like 20 days!!!