On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :(
that is a nasty bit of news. I'll run some numbers based on that and see what the ratio of spam to stamp engines would be. gut sense is that it's still not horrible, just not as advantageous. but you never know until you run the numbers.
Intelligence from DSBL indicated that there were _at least_ 350k compromised machines in the USA Roadrunner network alone at one stage. They are currently tracking around 1.5 million compromised machines. The Swen and blaster worms install various spamware and backdoors. These have been estimated to have infected millions of machines worldwide and later versions removed characteristics which removed tellltale compromise signs when scanned - now they mostly "phone home", instead of listening for commands. The pool of infected machines is huge. I just hope you're right about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly built example. AB