[camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project

Alan Brown alanb at digistar.com
Thu Jan 1 08:54:40 PST 2004


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





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