Massive Spam Shot of "Storm Trojan"

jcatcw writes "Postini has already counted nearly 5 million copies of the spam in the last 24 hours, and calculated that the run currently accounts for 87% of all malware being spread through email. 'Expect this to grow much larger,' a Postini spokesman said; 'It should top out at 60 million messages within the next 24 hours.' It's the largest attack in the last 12 months, and more than three times the volume of the two biggest in recent memory: a pair of blasts in December and January. The spam carries a ZIP file attachment posing as a patch with subjects such as Worm Alert!, Worm Detected, Spyware Detected!, or Virus Activity Detected."

Comments

Re:Another day in the world of near-monoculture.

[blueZhift]

Shutting down zombies would definitely slow this stuff down. I know that in the past at least, some universities would cut off network access for computers that were apparently compromised. I don't know if this is the case at the majority of schools though. Sadly, it probably will take legislation to force ISPs to cut off zombies from their networks. I don't know why they don't do this already. Do these zombies help their bottom line, or is it less costly to keep them on the network to avoid fielding customer service calls?