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Fortune 1000 Companies Sending Spam, Phishing

An anonymous reader writes "The Register takes a look at spam touting everything from Viagra to phishing sites being sent from Fortune 1000 networks. Oracle was found to have a machine pushing out a PayPal phishing scam, and BestBuy had a system sending thousands of spams a month. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog also is tracking this story, finding stock spam being pumped from ExxonMobile and from American Electric Power, among others. Another machine at IndyMac Bank was the source of spam touting generic prescription drugs. From the story: '...an IT engineer with American Electric Power, said the stock spam came from a bot-infected computer belonging to a contractor at one of its power generator plants.'"

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Big surprise by cdrguru · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Could it be that most users can't seem to understand that surfing to porn sites leads to malware being installed? How about clicking on random attachments leads to compromised computers?

    Perhaps computers meant to be used as email appliances should really be email appliances rather than general purpose programmable (and repurposeable) computers.

    The alternative to this is to figure out a way to make sure that it is impossible for users to ever install anything on their computer that will compromise it. Sounds impossible to me. Making an idiot-proof email application is just a stopgap until someone comes along with a better idiot.

  2. Re:Make them pay! by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I'm sorry, who the fuck died and made you arbiter of what was a "reasonable limit" of email that I should be allowed to send?